1,243,614 research outputs found
On sampling social networking services
This article aims at summarizing the existing methods for sampling social
networking services and proposing a faster confidence interval for related
sampling methods. It also includes comparisons of common network sampling
techniques
Sampling Online Social Networks via Heterogeneous Statistics
Most sampling techniques for online social networks (OSNs) are based on a
particular sampling method on a single graph, which is referred to as a
statistics. However, various realizing methods on different graphs could
possibly be used in the same OSN, and they may lead to different sampling
efficiencies, i.e., asymptotic variances. To utilize multiple statistics for
accurate measurements, we formulate a mixture sampling problem, through which
we construct a mixture unbiased estimator which minimizes asymptotic variance.
Given fixed sampling budgets for different statistics, we derive the optimal
weights to combine the individual estimators; given fixed total budget, we show
that a greedy allocation towards the most efficient statistics is optimal. In
practice, the sampling efficiencies of statistics can be quite different for
various targets and are unknown before sampling. To solve this problem, we
design a two-stage framework which adaptively spends a partial budget to test
different statistics and allocates the remaining budget to the inferred best
statistics. We show that our two-stage framework is a generalization of 1)
randomly choosing a statistics and 2) evenly allocating the total budget among
all available statistics, and our adaptive algorithm achieves higher efficiency
than these benchmark strategies in theory and experiment
Partitioned Sampling of Public Opinions Based on Their Social Dynamics
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire
population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world,
individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social
network. In this paper, we explore the idea of partitioned sampling, which
partitions individuals with high opinion similarities into groups and then
samples every group separately to obtain an accurate estimate of the population
opinion. We rigorously formulate the above idea as an optimization problem. We
then show that the simple partitions which contain only one sample in each
group are always better, and reduce finding the optimal simple partition to a
well-studied Min-r-Partition problem. We adapt an approximation algorithm and a
heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem. Moreover, to obtain
opinion similarity efficiently, we adapt a well-known opinion evolution model
to characterize social interactions, and provide an exact computation of
opinion similarities based on the model. We use both synthetic and real-world
datasets to demonstrate that the partitioned sampling method results in
significant improvement in sampling quality and it is robust when some opinion
similarities are inaccurate or even missing
- …