91,695 research outputs found
Degree Ranking Using Local Information
Most real world dynamic networks are evolved very fast with time. It is not
feasible to collect the entire network at any given time to study its
characteristics. This creates the need to propose local algorithms to study
various properties of the network. In the present work, we estimate degree rank
of a node without having the entire network. The proposed methods are based on
the power law degree distribution characteristic or sampling techniques. The
proposed methods are simulated on synthetic networks, as well as on real world
social networks. The efficiency of the proposed methods is evaluated using
absolute and weighted error functions. Results show that the degree rank of a
node can be estimated with high accuracy using only samples of the
network size. The accuracy of the estimation decreases from high ranked to low
ranked nodes. We further extend the proposed methods for random networks and
validate their efficiency on synthetic random networks, that are generated
using Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi model. Results show that the proposed methods can be
efficiently used for random networks as well
Extraction and Analysis of Facebook Friendship Relations
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a unique Web and social phenomenon, affecting tastes and behaviors of their users and helping them to maintain/create friendships. It is interesting to analyze the growth and evolution of Online Social Networks both from the point of view of marketing and other of new services and from a scientific viewpoint, since their structure and evolution may share similarities with real-life social networks. In social sciences, several techniques for analyzing (online) social networks have been developed, to evaluate quantitative properties (e.g., defining metrics and measures of structural characteristics of the networks) or qualitative aspects (e.g., studying the attachment model for the network evolution, the binary trust relationships, and the link prediction problem).\ud
However, OSN analysis poses novel challenges both to Computer and Social scientists. We present our long-term research effort in analyzing Facebook, the largest and arguably most successful OSN today: it gathers more than 500 million users. Access to data about Facebook users and their friendship relations, is restricted; thus, we acquired the necessary information directly from the front-end of the Web site, in order to reconstruct a sub-graph representing anonymous interconnections among a significant subset of users. We describe our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawler for Facebook data extraction. To minimize bias, we adopt two different graph mining techniques: breadth-first search (BFS) and rejection sampling. To analyze the structural properties of samples consisting of millions of nodes, we developed a specific tool for analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of social networks, adopting and improving existing Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques and algorithms
Online Influence Maximization (Extended Version)
Social networks are commonly used for marketing purposes. For example, free
samples of a product can be given to a few influential social network users (or
"seed nodes"), with the hope that they will convince their friends to buy it.
One way to formalize marketers' objective is through influence maximization (or
IM), whose goal is to find the best seed nodes to activate under a fixed
budget, so that the number of people who get influenced in the end is
maximized. Recent solutions to IM rely on the influence probability that a user
influences another one. However, this probability information may be
unavailable or incomplete. In this paper, we study IM in the absence of
complete information on influence probability. We call this problem Online
Influence Maximization (OIM) since we learn influence probabilities at the same
time we run influence campaigns. To solve OIM, we propose a multiple-trial
approach, where (1) some seed nodes are selected based on existing influence
information; (2) an influence campaign is started with these seed nodes; and
(3) users' feedback is used to update influence information. We adopt the
Explore-Exploit strategy, which can select seed nodes using either the current
influence probability estimation (exploit), or the confidence bound on the
estimation (explore). Any existing IM algorithm can be used in this framework.
We also develop an incremental algorithm that can significantly reduce the
overhead of handling users' feedback information. Our experiments show that our
solution is more effective than traditional IM methods on the partial
information.Comment: 13 pages. To appear in KDD 2015. Extended versio
Social Bootstrapping: How Pinterest and Last.fm Social Communities Benefit by Borrowing Links from Facebook
How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each
user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding
features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying
links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper
quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in
enhancing a social experience of the website. First, we develop a stylised
analytical model that suggests that copying tends to produce a giant connected
component (i.e., a connected community) quickly and preserves properties such
as reciprocity and clustering, up to a linear multiplicative factor. Second, we
use data from two websites, Pinterest and Last.fm, to empirically compare the
subgraph of links copied from Facebook to links created natively. We find that
the copied subgraph has a giant component, higher reciprocity and clustering,
and confirm that the copied connections see higher social interactions.
However, the need for copying diminishes as users become more active and
influential. Such users tend to create links natively on the website, to users
who are more similar to them than their Facebook friends. Our findings give new
insights into understanding how bootstrapping from established social networks
can help engage new users by enhancing social interactivity.Comment: Proc. 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 201
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