The Influence of Indirect Ties on Social Network Dynamics

While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen less attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of doctors, schools, or babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this work we empirically study the predictive power of indirect ties in two dynamic processes in social networks: new link formation and information diffusion. We not only verify the predictive power of indirect ties in new link formation but also show that this power is effective over longer social distance. Moreover, we show that the strength of an indirect tie positively correlates to the speed of forming a new link between the two end users of the indirect tie. Finally, we show that the strength of indirect ties can serve as a predictor for diffusion paths in social networks.

[1]  Hakim Hacid,et al.  A predictive model for the temporal dynamics of information diffusion in online social networks , 2012, WWW.

[2]  M. Newman,et al.  The structure of scientific collaboration networks. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[3]  N. Christakis,et al.  Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network : longitudinal analysis of the Framingham Heart Study social network. Commentary , 2009 .

[4]  Scott Counts,et al.  Predicting the Speed, Scale, and Range of Information Diffusion in Twitter , 2010, ICWSM.

[5]  Éva Tardos,et al.  Maximizing the Spread of Influence through a Social Network , 2015, Theory Comput..

[6]  Tom Fawcett,et al.  An introduction to ROC analysis , 2006, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[7]  Mark S. Granovetter.  Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers , 1974 .

[8]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Link and Triadic Closure Delay: Temporal Metrics for Social Network Dynamics , 2014, ICWSM.

[9]  M. McPherson,et al.  Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks , 2001 .

[10]  Rossano Schifanella,et al.  The role of information diffusion in the evolution of social networks , 2013, KDD.

[11]  Jon Kleinberg,et al.  The link prediction problem for social networks , 2003, CIKM '03.

[12]  Adriana Iamnitchi,et al.  Cheaters in a gaming social network , 2011, PERV.

[13]  Ciro Cattuto,et al.  What's in a crowd? Analysis of face-to-face behavioral networks , 2010, Journal of theoretical biology.

[14]  Adriana Iamnitchi,et al.  Relationships under the Microscope with Interaction-Backed Social Networks , 2013 .

[15]  Cécile Favre,et al.  Information diffusion in online social networks: a survey , 2013, SGMD.

[16]  D. Watts,et al.  Origins of Homophily in an Evolving Social Network1 , 2009, American Journal of Sociology.

[17]  Adam M. Kleinbaum.  Organizational Misfits and the Origins of Brokerage in Intra-Firm Networks , 2012 .

[18]  I. N. A. C. I. J. H. Fowler.  Book Review: Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. , 2009 .

[19]  Jinyang Li,et al.  F2F: Reliable Storage in Open Networks , 2006, IPTPS.

[20]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Friends and neighbors on the Web , 2003, Soc. Networks.

[21]  Michael Szell,et al.  Measuring social dynamics in a massive multiplayer online game , 2009, Soc. Networks.

[22]  A. Rapoport.  Spread of information through a population with socio-structural bias: I. Assumption of transitivity , 1953 .

[23]  Jennifer Neville,et al.  Modeling relationship strength in online social networks , 2010, WWW '10.

[24]  Noah E. Friedkin,et al.  Horizons of Observability and Limits of Informal Control in Organizations , 1983 .

[25]  Stan Matwin,et al.  Addressing the Curse of Imbalanced Training Sets: One-Sided Selection , 1997, ICML.

[26]  Adriana Iamnitchi,et al.  The power of indirect ties in friend-to-friend storage systems , 2014, 14-th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing.

[27]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Diffusion Dynamics of Games on Online Social Networks , 2010, WOSN.

[28]  Haiying Shen,et al.  SOAP: A Social network Aided Personalized and effective spam filter to clean your e-mail box , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[29]  Jimeng Sun,et al.  Social influence analysis in large-scale networks , 2009, KDD.

[30]  Matei Ripeanu,et al.  Branded with a scarlet "C": cheaters in a gaming social network , 2012, WWW.

[31]  Mark S. Granovetter.  The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[32]  Jie Gao,et al.  Predicting group stability in online social networks , 2013, WWW.

[33]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  Predicting tie strength with social media , 2009, CHI.

[34]  Adriana Iamnitchi,et al.  On the Design of Socially-Aware Distributed Systems , 2012 .

[35]  Linyuan Lu,et al.  Link Prediction in Complex Networks: A Survey , 2010, ArXiv.

[36]  William W. Cohen,et al.  Recommendation as Classification: Using Social and Content-Based Information in Recommendation , 1998, AAAI/IAAI.

[37]  Jon M. Kleinberg,et al.  Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution , 2006, KDD '06.

[38]  Mehmet E. Yildiz,et al.  Asymmetric information diffusion via gossiping on static and dynamic networks , 2010, 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[39]  J. Coleman,et al.  Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital , 1988, American Journal of Sociology.

[40]  Jon M. Kleinberg,et al.  The link-prediction problem for social networks , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[41]  Marco Brambilla,et al.  A revenue sharing mechanism for federated search and advertising , 2012, WWW.

[42]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  The role of social networks in information diffusion , 2012, WWW.

[43]  Jennifer Neville,et al.  Using Transactional Information to Predict Link Strength in Online Social Networks , 2009, ICWSM.

[44]  N. Christakis,et al.  The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years , 2007, The New England journal of medicine.

[45]  Nitesh V. Chawla,et al.  SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique , 2002, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[46]  Matei Ripeanu,et al.  Cheating in Online Games: A Social Network Perspective , 2014, TOIT.