Title
Capturing The Influence Of Geopolitical Ties From Wikipedia With Reduced Google Matrix
Abstract
Interactions between countries originate from diverse aspects such as geographic proximity, trade, socio-cultural habits, language, religions, etc. Geopolitics studies the influence of a country's geographic space on its political power and its relationships with other countries. This work reveals the potential of Wikipedia mining for geopolitical study. Actually, Wikipedia offers solid knowledge and strong correlations among countries by linking web pages together for different types of information (e.g. economical, historical, political, and many others). The major finding of this paper is to show that meaningful results on the influence of country ties can be extracted from the hyperlinked structure of Wikipedia. We leverage a novel stochastic matrix representation of Markov chains of complex directed networks called the reduced Google matrix theory. For a selected small size set of nodes, the reduced Google matrix concentrates direct and indirect links of the million-node sized Wikipedia network into a small Perron-Frobenius matrix keeping the PageRank probabilities of the global Wikipedia network. We perform a novel sensitivity analysis that leverages this reduced Google matrix to characterize the influence of relationships between countries from the global network. We apply this analysis to two chosen sets of countries (i.e. the set of 27 European Union countries and a set of 40 top worldwide countries). We show that with our sensitivity analysis we can exhibit easily very meaningful information on geopolitics from five different Wikipedia editions (English, Arabic, Russian, French and German).
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1371/journal.pone.0201397
PLOS ONE
Field
DocType
Volume
PageRank,Global network,Stochastic matrix,Web page,Information retrieval,Matrix (mathematics),Computer science,Markov chain,Google matrix,European union
Journal
13
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
1932-6203
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Samer El Zant110.70
Katia Jaffrès-Runser212919.30
Dima Shepelyansky311113.71