Related papers: Four Degrees of Separation, Really
We define a (pseudo-)distance between graphs based on the spectrum of the normalized Laplacian, which is easy to compute or to estimate numerically. It can therefore serve as a rough classification of large empirical graphs into families…
The average distance from a node to all other nodes in a graph, or from a query point in a metric space to a set of points, is a fundamental quantity in data analysis. The inverse of the average distance, known as the (classic) closeness…
Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of…
The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have…
Increasingly, critical decisions in public policy, governance, and business strategy rely on a deeper understanding of the needs and opinions of constituent members (e.g. citizens, shareholders). While it has become easier to collect a…
Comparison of graph structure is a ubiquitous task in data analysis and machine learning, with diverse applications in fields such as neuroscience, cyber security, social network analysis, and bioinformatics, among others. Discovery and…
We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective…
Stanley Milgram's small world experiment presents "six degrees of separation" of our world. One phenomenon of the experiment still puzzling us is that how individuals operating with the social network information with their characteristics…
We present a study of information flow that takes into account the observation that an item relevant to one person is more likely to be of interest to individuals in the same social circle than those outside of it. This is due to the fact…
Metric graphs are ubiquitous in science and engineering. For example, many data are drawn from hidden spaces that are graph-like, such as the cosmic web. A metric graph offers one of the simplest yet still meaningful ways to represent the…
The chronic widespread misuse of statistics is usually inadvertent, not intentional. We find cautionary examples in a series of recent papers by Christakis and Fowler that advance statistical arguments for the transmission via social…
The friendship paradox is the observation that the degrees of the neighbors of a node in any network will, on average, be greater than the degree of the node itself. In common parlance, your friends have more friends than you do. In this…
Topological heterogeneities of social networks have a strong impact on the individuals embedded in those networks. One of the interesting phenomena driven by such heterogeneities is the friendship paradox (FP), stating that the mean degree…
This study provides insights into the quantitative similarities, differences and relationships between users' spatial, face-to-face, urban social networks and their transpatial, online counterparts. We explore and map the social ties within…
A key measure that has been used extensively in analyzing complex networks is the degree of a node (the number of the node's neighbors). Because of its discrete nature, when the degree measure was used in analyzing weighted networks,…
The classical friendship paradox asserts that, on average, an individual's neighbors have a higher degree than the individual. This statement concerns network-level means and does not describe how often a typical node is locally dominated…
Online data sources offer tremendous promise to demography and other social sciences, but researchers worry that the group of people who are represented in online datasets can be different from the general population. We show that by…
Multi-layered social networks reflect complex relationships existing in modern interconnected IT systems. In such a network each pair of nodes may be linked by many edges that correspond to different communication or collaboration user…
The Internet provides students with a unique opportunity to connect and maintain social ties with peers from other schools, irrespective of how far they are from each other. However, little is known about the real structure of such online…
In this work, we perform an in-depth study of recently introduced average-case quantum distances. The average-case distances approximate the average Total-Variation (TV) distance between measurement outputs of two quantum processes, in…