2 research outputs found
Personalized Degrees: Effects on Link Formation in Dynamic Networks from an Egocentric Perspective
Understanding mechanisms driving link formation in dynamic social networks is
a long-standing problem that has implications to understanding social structure
as well as link prediction and recommendation. Social networks exhibit a high
degree of transitivity, which explains the successes of common neighbor-based
methods for link prediction. In this paper, we examine mechanisms behind link
formation from the perspective of an ego node. We introduce the notion of
personalized degree for each neighbor node of the ego, which is the number of
other neighbors a particular neighbor is connected to. From empirical analyses
on four on-line social network datasets, we find that neighbors with higher
personalized degree are more likely to lead to new link formations when they
serve as common neighbors with other nodes, both in undirected and directed
settings. This is complementary to the finding of Adamic and Adar that neighbor
nodes with higher (global) degree are less likely to lead to new link
formations. Furthermore, on directed networks, we find that personalized
out-degree has a stronger effect on link formation than personalized in-degree,
whereas global in-degree has a stronger effect than global out-degree. We
validate our empirical findings through several link recommendation experiments
and observe that incorporating both personalized and global degree into link
recommendation greatly improves accuracy.Comment: To appear at the 10th International Workshop on Modeling Social Media
co-located with the Web Conference 201