Related papers: Computational Social Scientist Beware: Simpson's P…
We present an extensive study of the joint effects of heterogeneous social agents and their heterogeneous social links in a bounded confidence opinion dynamics model. The full phase diagram of the model is explored for two different…
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for…
There is growing recognition that the network structures arising from interactions between different entities in physical, social and biological systems fundamentally alter the evolutionary outcomes. Previous paradigm exploring evolutionary…
Statistical divergence is widely applied in multimedia processing, basically due to regularity and interpretable features displayed in data. However, in a broader range of data realm, these advantages may no longer be feasible, and…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
Given that data-dependent algorithmic systems have become impactful in more domains of life, the need for individuals to promote their own interests and hold algorithms accountable has grown. To have meaningful influence, individuals must…
Modern biomedical, behavioral and psychological inference about cause-effect relationships respects an ergodic assumption, that is, that mean response of representative samples allow predictions about individual members of those samples.…
The friendship paradox is revisited by considering both local and global averages of friends. How the economics of attention affects the recruitment of friends is examined. Statistical implications of varying individual attentions are…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and decision making behavior of individuals in a human society. Social learning is used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that aim to…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
The friendship paradox in social networks states that your friends have more friends than you do, on average. Recently, a stronger variant of the paradox was shown to hold for most people within a network: `most of your friends have more…
The massive amounts of data that social media generates has facilitated the study of online human behavior on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. At the same time, the much discussed apparent randomness with which people interact online…
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) exhibit a remarkable heterogeneity of students. The advent of complex "big data" from MOOC platforms is a challenging yet rewarding opportunity to deeply understand how students are engaged in MOOCs. Past…
We explore "omitted label contexts," in which training data is limited to a subset of the possible labels. This setting is standard among specialized human experts or specific, focused studies. By studying Simpson's paradox, we observe that…
The friendship paradox is the phenomenon that in social networks, people on average have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox is an extension to attributes other than the number of friends. The friendship…
Simpson's paradox is an obstacle to establishing a probabilistic association between two events $a_1$ and $a_2$, given the third (lurking) random variable $B$. We focus on scenarios when the random variables $A$ (which combines $a_1$,…
Natural and artificial collectives exhibit heterogeneities across different dimensions, contributing to the complexity of their behavior. We investigate the effect of two such heterogeneities on collective opinion dynamics: heterogeneity of…
This paper presents a new approach to behavioral-social dynamics of pedestrian crowds by suitable development of methods of the kinetic theory. It is shown how heterogeneous individual behaviors can modify the collective dynamics, as well…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…