Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Simmelian Backbones: Amplifying Hidden Homophily in Facebook Networks
    Empirical social networks are often aggregate proxies for several heterogeneous relations. In online social networks, for instance, interactions related to friendship, kinship, business, interests, and other relationships may all be represented as catchall 'friendships.' Because several relations are mingled into one, the resulting networks exhibit relatively high and uniform density. As a consequence, the variation in positional differences and local cohesion may be too small for reliable analysis. We introduce a method to identify the essential relationships in networks representing social interactions. Our method is based on a novel concept of triadic cohesion that is motivated by Simmel's concept of membership in social groups. We demonstrate that our Simmelian backbones are capable of extracting structure from Facebook interaction networks that makes them easy to visualize and analyze. Since all computations are local, the method can be restricted to partial networks such as ego networks, and scales to big data.
    Scopus© Citations 57  921
  • Publication
    Link Prediction with Social Vector Clocks
    State-of-the-art link prediction utilizes combinations of complex features derived from network panel data. We here show that computationally less expensive features can achieve the same performance in the common scenario in which the data is available as a sequence of interactions. Our features are based on social vector clocks, an adaptation of the vector-clock concept introduced in distributed computing to social interaction networks. In fact, our experiments suggest that by taking into account the order and spacing of interactions, social vector clocks exploit different aspects of link formation so that their combination with previous approaches yields the most accurate predictor to date.
    Scopus© Citations 20  477