Related papers: Preference or opportunity? Why do we find more fri…
Are online networking services complicit in facilitating social change for the worse? In two empirically informed simulation studies, we give a proof-of-concept that the speed of networking and the amplification of network actors'…
Many real-world networks exhibit degree-assortativity, with nodes of similar degree more likely to link to one another. Particularly in social networks, the contribution to the total assortativity varies with degree, featuring a distinctive…
Preferential attachment, homophily and, their consequences such as the glass ceiling effect have been well-studied in the context of undirected networks. However, the lack of an intuitive, theoretically tractable model of a directed,…
The personal network of relationships is structured in circles of friendships, that go from the most intense relationships to the least intense ones. While this is a well established result, little is known about the stability of those…
We study a unique network dataset including periodic surveys and electronic logs of dyadic contacts via smartphones. The participants were a sample of freshmen entering university in the Fall 2011. Their opinions on a variety of political…
Same-race mentorship preference refers to mentors or mentees forming connections significantly influenced by a shared race. Although racial diversity in science has been well-studied and linked to favorable outcomes, the extent and effects…
Users of social networks display diversified behavior and online habits. For instance, a user's tendency to reply to a post can depend on the user and the person posting. For convenience, we group users into aggregated behavioral patterns,…
Network autocorrelation models are widely used to evaluate the impact of social influence on some variable of interest. This is a large class of models that parsimoniously accounts for how one's neighbors influence one's own behaviors or…
Though algorithms promise many benefits including efficiency, objectivity and accuracy, they may also introduce or amplify biases. Here we study two well-known algorithms, namely PageRank and Who-to-Follow (WTF), and show to what extent…
In social networks, it is conventionally thought that two individuals with more overlapped friends tend to establish a new friendship, which could be stated as homophily breeding new connections. While the recent hypothesis of maximum…
The mechanism of preferential attachment underpins most recent social network formation models. Yet few authors attempt to check or quantify assumptions on this mechanism. We call generalized preferential attachment any kind of preference…
One of interesting phenomena due to topological heterogeneities in complex networks is the friendship paradox: Your friends have on average more friends than you do. Recently, this paradox has been generalized for arbitrary node attributes,…
We examine a weighted-network multi-agent model with preferential selection such that agents choose partners with the probability $p(w)$, where $w$ is the number of their past selections. When $p(w)$ increases sublinearly with the number of…
Triangles are an important building block and distinguishing feature of real-world networks, but their structure is still poorly understood. Despite numerous reports on the abundance of triangles, there is very little information on what…
Reciprocity, or the tendency of individuals to mirror behavior, is a key measure that describes information exchange in a social network. Users in social networks tend to engage in different levels of reciprocal behavior. Differences in…
It is well known that networks generated by common mechanisms such as preferential attachment and homophily can disadvantage the minority group by limiting their ability to establish links with the majority group. This has the effect of…
Students' decisions on whether to take a class are strongly affected by whether their friends plan to take the class with them. A student may prefer to be assigned to a course they likes less, just to be with their friends, rather than…
"Rich-get-richer" and "homophily" are two important phenomena in evolving social networks. "Rich-get-richer" means people with higher followings are more likely to attract new fans, and "homophily" means people prefer to bond with others of…
We study the task of node classification for graph neural networks (GNNs) and establish a connection between group fairness, as measured by statistical parity and equal opportunity, and local assortativity, i.e., the tendency of linked…
In the U.S., a significant portion of many people's life-long social networks is formed in college. Yet our understanding of many aspects of this formation process, such as the role of time variation, heterogeneity between educational…