Title
Simmelian backbones: amplifying hidden homophily in Facebook networks
Abstract
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2492517.2492569
Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
Keywords
Field
DocType
networks exhibit,social group,empirical social network,simmelian backbone,online social network,hidden homophily,facebook network,social interaction,local cohesion,facebook interaction network,triadic cohesion,novel concept,social sciences
Data science,Social network,Friendship,Homophily,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Cohesion (chemistry),Social group,World Wide Web,Kinship,Evolving networks,Big data,Machine learning
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.79
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bobo Nick1974.42
Conrad Lee2493.83
Pádraig Cunningham33086218.37
Ulrik Brandes42308181.69