Related papers: Respondent-Driven Sampling in Online Social Networ…
Respondent-driven sampling is a widely-used network sampling technique, designed to sample from hard-to-reach populations. Estimation from the resulting samples is an area of active research, with software available to compute at least four…
In order to sample marginalized and/or hard-to-reach populations, respondent-driven sampling (RDS) and similar techniques reach their participants via peer referral. Under a Markov model for RDS, previous research has shown that if the…
Web crawling, snowball sampling, and respondent-driven sampling (RDS) are three types of network sampling techniques used to contact individuals in hard-to-reach populations. This paper studies these procedures as a Markov process on the…
Recommender Systems (RS) currently represent a fundamental tool in online services, especially with the advent of Online Social Networks (OSN). In this case, users generate huge amounts of contents and they can be quickly overloaded by…
Population size estimates for hidden and hard-to-reach populations are particularly important when members are known to suffer from disproportion health issues or to pose health risks to the larger ambient population in which they are…
Social networks play a key role in studying various individual and social behaviors. To use social networks in a study, their structural properties must be measured. For offline social networks, the conventional procedure is…
The discovery of the "hidden population", whose size and membership are unknown, is made possible by assuming that its members are connected in a social network by their relationships. We explore these groups by a chain-referral sampling…
One of the most significant current challenges in large-scale online social networks, is to establish a concise and coherent method able to collect and summarize data. Sampling the content of an Online Social Network (OSN) plays an…
Characterizing large online social networks (OSNs) through node querying is a challenging task. OSNs often impose severe constraints on the query rate, hence limiting the sample size to a small fraction of the total network. Various ad-hoc…
Our goal in this paper is to develop a practical framework for obtaining a uniform sample of users in an online social network (OSN) by crawling its social graph. Such a sample allows to estimate any user property and some topological…
Some of the most used sampling mechanisms that implicitly leverage a social network depend on tuning parameters; for instance, Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is specified by the number of seeds and maximum number of referrals. We are…
Network sampling is used around the world for surveys of vulnerable, hard-to-reach populations including people at risk for HIV, opioid misuse, and emerging epidemics. The sampling methods include tracing social links to add new people to…
Analysis of social networks with limited data access is challenging for third parties. To address this challenge, a number of studies have developed algorithms that estimate properties of social networks via a simple random walk. However,…
Online planning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) enables agents to make sequential decisions by simulating future trajectories from the current state, making it well-suited for large-scale or dynamic environments. Sample-based methods…
Most sampling techniques for online social networks (OSNs) are based on a particular sampling method on a single graph, which is referred to as a statistics. However, various realizing methods on different graphs could possibly be used in…
Data concerning the users and usage of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has become available externally, from public resources (e.g., user profiles), participation in OSNs (e.g., establishing relationships and recording transactions such as…
Online Social Networks(OSNs) have established virtual platforms enabling people to express their opinions, interests and thoughts in a variety of contexts and domains, allowing legitimate users as well as spammers and other untrustworthy…
Rejection sampling is a technique for sampling from difficult distributions. However, its use is limited due to a high rejection rate. Common adaptive rejection sampling methods either work only for very specific distributions or without…
The uniqueness of online social networks makes it possible to implement new methods that increase the quality and effectiveness of research processes. While surveys are one of the most important tools for research, the representativeness of…
With the rising number of machine learning competitions, the world has witnessed an exciting race for the best algorithms. However, the involved data selection process may fundamentally suffer from evidence ambiguity and concept drift…