Social and Information Networks
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Showing new listings for Friday, 15 November 2024
- [1] arXiv:2411.09100 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: General linear threshold models with application to influence maximizationComments: 30 pages, 10 figuresSubjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Methodology (stat.ME)
A number of models have been developed for information spread through networks, often for solving the Influence Maximization (IM) problem. IM is the task of choosing a fixed number of nodes to "seed" with information in order to maximize the spread of this information through the network, with applications in areas such as marketing and public health. Most methods for this problem rely heavily on the assumption of known strength of connections between network members (edge weights), which is often unrealistic. In this paper, we develop a likelihood-based approach to estimate edge weights from the fully and partially observed information diffusion paths. We also introduce a broad class of information diffusion models, the general linear threshold (GLT) model, which generalizes the well-known linear threshold (LT) model by allowing arbitrary distributions of node activation thresholds. We then show our weight estimator is consistent under the GLT and some mild assumptions. For the special case of the standard LT model, we also present a much faster expectation-maximization approach for weight estimation. Finally, we prove that for the GLT models, the IM problem can be solved by a natural greedy algorithm with standard optimality guarantees if all node threshold distributions have concave cumulative distribution functions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate that the flexibility in the choice of threshold distribution combined with the estimation of edge weights significantly improves the quality of IM solutions, spread prediction, and the estimates of the node activation probabilities.
- [2] arXiv:2411.09389 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Less is More: Unseen Domain Fake News Detection via Causal Propagation SubstructuresComments: 9 pages, 2 figures, 5 tablesSubjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
The spread of fake news on social media poses significant threats to individuals and society. Text-based and graph-based models have been employed for fake news detection by analysing news content and propagation networks, showing promising results in specific scenarios. However, these data-driven models heavily rely on pre-existing in-distribution data for training, limiting their performance when confronted with fake news from emerging or previously unseen domains, known as out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Tackling OOD fake news is a challenging yet critical task. In this paper, we introduce the Causal Subgraph-oriented Domain Adaptive Fake News Detection (CSDA) model, designed to enhance zero-shot fake news detection by extracting causal substructures from propagation graphs using in-distribution data and generalising this approach to OOD data. The model employs a graph neural network based mask generation process to identify dominant nodes and edges within the propagation graph, using these substructures for fake news detection. Additionally, the performance of CSDA is further improved through contrastive learning in few-shot scenarios, where a limited amount of OOD data is available for training. Extensive experiments on public social media datasets demonstrate that CSDA effectively handles OOD fake news detection, achieving a 7 to 16 percents accuracy improvement over other state-of-the-art models.
- [3] arXiv:2411.09486 [pdf, other]
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Title: An Approach to Twinning and Mining Collaborative Network of Construction ProjectsJournal-ref: Automation in Construction, 2021Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Understanding complex collaboration processes is essential for the success of construction projects. However, there is still a lack of efficient methods for timely collection and analysis of collaborative networks. Therefore, an integrated framework consisting three parts, namely, system updating for data collection, data preprocessing, and social network analysis, is proposed for the twinning and mining collaborative network of a construction project. First, a system updating strategy for automatic data collection is introduced. Centrality measures are then utilized to identify key players, including hubs and brokers. Meanwhile, information sharing frequency (ISF) and association rule mining are introduced to discover collaborative patterns, that is, frequently collaborating users (FCUs) and associations between information flows and task levels. Finally, the proposed framework is validated and demonstrated in a large-scale project. The results show that key players, FCUs, and associations between information flows and task levels were successfully discovered, providing a deep understanding of collaboration and communication for decision-making processes. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by: 1) introducing ISF and Apriori-based association mining algorithm to identify FCUs and information flow patterns in collaboration; 2) establishing a new data-driven framework to map and analyze fine-grained collaborative networks automatically. It is also shown that people tend to form small groups to handle certain levels or types of tasks more efficiently. Other researchers and industrial practitioners may use this work as a foundation to further improve the efficiency of collaboration and communication.
- [4] arXiv:2411.09675 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Citation Sentiment Reflects Multiscale Sociocultural NormsComments: 16 pages, 8 figures in main; 13 pages, 3 figures in supplementSubjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Modern science is formally structured around scholarly publication, where scientific knowledge is canonized through citation. Precisely how citations are given and accrued can provide information about the value of discovery, the history of scientific ideas, the structure of fields, and the space or scope of inquiry. Yet parsing this information has been challenging because citations are not simply present or absent; rather, they differ in purpose, function, and sentiment. In this paper, we investigate how critical and favorable sentiments are distributed across citations, and demonstrate that citation sentiment tracks sociocultural norms across scales of collaboration, discipline, and country. At the smallest scale of individuals, we find that researchers cite scholars they have collaborated with more favorably (and less critically) than scholars they have not collaborated with. Outside collaborative relationships, higher h-index scholars cite lower h-index scholars more critically. At the mesoscale of disciplines, we find that wetlab disciplines tend to be less critical than drylab disciplines, and disciplines that engage in more synthesis through publishing more review articles tend to be less critical. At the largest scale of countries, we find that greater individualism (and lesser acceptance of the unequal distribution of power) is associated with more critical sentiment. Collectively, our results demonstrate how sociocultural factors can explain variations in sentiment in scientific communication. As such, our study contributes to the broader understanding of how human factors influence the practice of science, and underscore the importance of considering the larger sociocultural contexts in which science progresses.
New submissions (showing 4 of 4 entries)
- [5] arXiv:2411.08608 (cross-list from cs.CY) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Comparative study of random walks with one-step memory on complex networksComments: 12 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, conferenceJournal-ref: Complex Networks XIV (CompleNet 2023). Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, ChamSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
We investigate searching efficiency of different kinds of random walk on complex networks which rely on local information and one-step memory. For the studied navigation strategies we obtained theoretical and numerical values for the graph mean first passage times as an indicator for the searching efficiency. The experiments with generated and real networks show that biasing based on inverse degree, persistence and local two-hop paths can lead to smaller searching times. Moreover, these biasing approaches can be combined to achieve a more robust random search strategy. Our findings can be applied in the modeling and solution of various real-world problems.
Cross submissions (showing 1 of 1 entries)
- [6] arXiv:2308.13303 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Age of Information Diffusion on Social NetworksComments: Accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions On Networking. A long abstract of this work appeared at MobiHoc 2023Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); Information Theory (cs.IT)
To promote viral marketing, major social platforms (e.g., Facebook Marketplace and Pinduoduo) repeatedly select and invite different users (as seeds) in online social networks to share fresh information about a product or service with their friends. Thereby, we are motivated to optimize a multi-stage seeding process of viral marketing in social networks, and adopt the recent notions of the peak and the average age of information (AoI) to measure the timeliness of promotion information received by network users. Our problem is different from the literature on information diffusion in social networks, which limits to one-time seeding and overlooks AoI dynamics or information replacement over time. As a critical step, we manage to develop closed-form expressions that characterize and trace AoI dynamics over any social network. For the peak AoI problem, we first prove the NP-hardness of our multi-stage seeding problem by a highly non-straightforward reduction from the dominating set problem, and then present a new polynomial-time algorithm that achieves good approximation guarantees (e.g., less than 2 for linear network topology). To minimize the average AoI, we also prove that our problem is NP-hard by properly reducing it from the set cover problem. Benefiting from our two-sided bound analysis on the average AoI objective, we build up a new framework for approximation analysis and link our problem to a much simplified sum-distance minimization problem. This intriguing connection inspires us to develop another polynomial-time algorithm that achieves a good approximation guarantee. Additionally, our theoretical results are well corroborated by experiments on a real social network.
- [7] arXiv:2406.17736 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Fairness in Social Influence Maximization via Optimal TransportSubjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)
We study fairness in social influence maximization, whereby one seeks to select seeds that spread a given information throughout a network, ensuring balanced outreach among different communities (e.g. demographic groups). In the literature, fairness is often quantified in terms of the expected outreach within individual communities. In this paper, we demonstrate that such fairness metrics can be misleading since they overlook the stochastic nature of information diffusion processes. When information diffusion occurs in a probabilistic manner, multiple outreach scenarios can occur. As such, outcomes such as ``In 50\% of the cases, no one in group 1 gets the information, while everyone in group 2 does, and in the other 50%, it is the opposite'', which always results in largely unfair outcomes, are classified as fair by a variety of fairness metrics in the literature. We tackle this problem by designing a new fairness metric, mutual fairness, that captures variability in outreach through optimal transport theory. We propose a new seed-selection algorithm that optimizes both outreach and mutual fairness, and we show its efficacy on several real datasets. We find that our algorithm increases fairness with only a minor decrease (and at times, even an increase) in efficiency.