57,247 research outputs found
Influence of Personal Preferences on Link Dynamics in Social Networks
We study a unique network dataset including periodic surveys and electronic
logs of dyadic contacts via smartphones. The participants were a sample of
freshmen entering university in the Fall 2011. Their opinions on a variety of
political and social issues and lists of activities on campus were regularly
recorded at the beginning and end of each semester for the first three years of
study. We identify a behavioral network defined by call and text data, and a
cognitive network based on friendship nominations in ego-network surveys. Both
networks are limited to study participants. Since a wide range of attributes on
each node were collected in self-reports, we refer to these networks as
attribute-rich networks. We study whether student preferences for certain
attributes of friends can predict formation and dissolution of edges in both
networks. We introduce a method for computing student preferences for different
attributes which we use to predict link formation and dissolution. We then rank
these attributes according to their importance for making predictions. We find
that personal preferences, in particular political views, and preferences for
common activities help predict link formation and dissolution in both the
behavioral and cognitive networks.Comment: 12 page
Detecting Strong Ties Using Network Motifs
Detecting strong ties among users in social and information networks is a
fundamental operation that can improve performance on a multitude of
personalization and ranking tasks. Strong-tie edges are often readily obtained
from the social network as users often participate in multiple overlapping
networks via features such as following and messaging. These networks may vary
greatly in size, density and the information they carry. This setting leads to
a natural strong tie detection task: given a small set of labeled strong tie
edges, how well can one detect unlabeled strong ties in the remainder of the
network?
This task becomes particularly daunting for the Twitter network due to scant
availability of pairwise relationship attribute data, and sparsity of strong
tie networks such as phone contacts. Given these challenges, a natural approach
is to instead use structural network features for the task, produced by {\em
combining} the strong and "weak" edges. In this work, we demonstrate via
experiments on Twitter data that using only such structural network features is
sufficient for detecting strong ties with high precision. These structural
network features are obtained from the presence and frequency of small network
motifs on combined strong and weak ties. We observe that using motifs larger
than triads alleviate sparsity problems that arise for smaller motifs, both due
to increased combinatorial possibilities as well as benefiting strongly from
searching beyond the ego network. Empirically, we observe that not all motifs
are equally useful, and need to be carefully constructed from the combined
edges in order to be effective for strong tie detection. Finally, we reinforce
our experimental findings with providing theoretical justification that
suggests why incorporating these larger sized motifs as features could lead to
increased performance in planted graph models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017 (Web-science track
Link Prediction via Matrix Completion
Inspired by practical importance of social networks, economic networks,
biological networks and so on, studies on large and complex networks have
attracted a surge of attentions in the recent years. Link prediction is a
fundamental issue to understand the mechanisms by which new links are added to
the networks. We introduce the method of robust principal component analysis
(robust PCA) into link prediction, and estimate the missing entries of the
adjacency matrix. On one hand, our algorithm is based on the sparsity and low
rank property of the matrix, on the other hand, it also performs very well when
the network is dense. This is because a relatively dense real network is also
sparse in comparison to the complete graph. According to extensive experiments
on real networks from disparate fields, when the target network is connected
and sufficiently dense, whatever it is weighted or unweighted, our method is
demonstrated to be very effective and with prediction accuracy being
considerably improved comparing with many state-of-the-art algorithms
Predicting Successful Memes using Network and Community Structure
We investigate the predictability of successful memes using their early
spreading patterns in the underlying social networks. We propose and analyze a
comprehensive set of features and develop an accurate model to predict future
popularity of a meme given its early spreading patterns. Our paper provides the
first comprehensive comparison of existing predictive frameworks. We categorize
our features into three groups: influence of early adopters, community
concentration, and characteristics of adoption time series. We find that
features based on community structure are the most powerful predictors of
future success. We also find that early popularity of a meme is not a good
predictor of its future popularity, contrary to common belief. Our methods
outperform other approaches, particularly in the task of detecting very popular
or unpopular memes.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Proceedings of 8th AAAI Intl. Conf. on
Weblogs and social media (ICWSM 2014
Effective and Efficient Similarity Index for Link Prediction of Complex Networks
Predictions of missing links of incomplete networks like protein-protein
interaction networks or very likely but not yet existent links in evolutionary
networks like friendship networks in web society can be considered as a
guideline for further experiments or valuable information for web users. In
this paper, we introduce a local path index to estimate the likelihood of the
existence of a link between two nodes. We propose a network model with
controllable density and noise strength in generating links, as well as collect
data of six real networks. Extensive numerical simulations on both modeled
networks and real networks demonstrated the high effectiveness and efficiency
of the local path index compared with two well-known and widely used indices,
the common neighbors and the Katz index. Indeed, the local path index provides
competitively accurate predictions as the Katz index while requires much less
CPU time and memory space, which is therefore a strong candidate for potential
practical applications in data mining of huge-size networks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 3 table
- …