Related papers: The role of unobservable characteristics in friend…
The observation that individuals tend to be friends with people who are similar to themselves, commonly known as homophily, is a prominent and well-studied feature of social networks. Many machine learning methods exploit homophily to…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
Homophily, the tendency of individuals to associate with others who share similar traits, has been identified as a major driving force in the formation and evolution of social ties. In many cases, it is not clear if homophily is the result…
Unveiling individuals' preferences for connecting with similar others (choice homophily) beyond the structural factors determining the pool of opportunities, is a challenging task. Here, we introduce a robust methodology for quantifying and…
Homophily based on observables is widespread in networks. Therefore, homophily based on unobservables (fixed effects) is also likely to be an important determinant of the interaction outcomes. Failing to properly account for latent…
This paper develops a method to conduct causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounders by leveraging networks with homophily, a frequently observed tendency to form edges with similar nodes. I introduce a concept of asymptotic…
We consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an…
We address the problem of using observational data to estimate peer contagion effects, the influence of treatments applied to individuals in a network on the outcomes of their neighbors. A main challenge to such estimation is that homophily…
In recent years, social media has become a ubiquitous and integral part of social networking. One of the major attentions made by social researchers is the tendency of like-minded people to interact with one another in social groups, a…
Is homophily in social and economic networks driven by a taste for homogeneity (preferences) or by a higher probability of meeting individuals with similar attributes (opportunity)? This paper studies identification and estimation of an…
Homophily is a significant mechanism for link prediction in complex network, of which principle describes that people with similar profiles or experiences tend to tie with each other. In a multi-relationship network, friendship among people…
Homophily, the tendency of individuals to connect with others who share similar attributes, is a defining feature of social networks. Understanding how groups interact, both within and across, is crucial for uncovering the dynamics of…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
Homophily is the seemingly ubiquitous tendency for people to connect and interact with other individuals who are similar to them. This is a well-documented principle and is fundamental for how society organizes. Although many social…
Research on friendship networks in schools suggests that heterogeneity increases homophily preferences. We argue that this may be a misleading interpretation of the coefficients of the exponential random graph models (p*) that are used to…
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…
This paper considers the evolution of a network in a discrete time, stochastic setting in which agents learn about each other through repeated interactions and maintain/break links on the basis of what they learn from these interactions.…
An increasing number of scholars are using longitudinal social network data to try to obtain estimates of peer or social influence effects. These data may provide additional statistical leverage, but they can introduce new inferential…
We study mixing patterns in networks, meaning the propensity for nodes of different kinds to connect to one another. The phenomenon of assortative mixing, whereby nodes prefer to connect to others that are similar to themselves, has been…
We consider the specification of effects of numerical actor attributes in statistical models for directed social networks. A fundamental mechanism is homophily or assortativity, where actors have a higher likelihood to be tied with others…