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Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks
- In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’07
, 2007
"... Online social networking sites like Orkut, YouTube, and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Internet. Users of these sites form a social network, which provides a powerful means of sharing, organizing, and finding content and contacts. The popularity of these sites provides an opportunity ..."
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Cited by 698 (14 self)
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Online social networking sites like Orkut, YouTube, and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Internet. Users of these sites form a social network, which provides a powerful means of sharing, organizing, and finding content and contacts. The popularity of these sites provides an opportunity to study the characteristics of online social network graphs at large scale. Understanding these graphs is important, both to improve current systems and to design new applications of online social networks. This paper presents a large-scale measurement study and analysis of the structure of multiple online social networks. We examine data gathered from four popular online social networks: Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal, and Orkut. We crawled the publicly accessible user links on each site, obtaining a large portion of each social network’s graph. Our data set contains over 11.3 million users and 328 million links. We believe that this is the first study to examine multiple online social networks at scale. Our results confirm the power-law, small-world, and scalefree properties of online social networks. We observe that the indegree of user nodes tends to match the outdegree; that the networks contain a densely connected core of high-degree nodes; and that this core links small groups of strongly clustered, low-degree nodes at the fringes of the network. Finally, we discuss the implications of these structural properties for the design of social network based systems.
Data Clustering: 50 Years Beyond K-Means
, 2008
"... Organizing data into sensible groupings is one of the most fundamental modes of understanding and learning. As an example, a common scheme of scientific classification puts organisms into taxonomic ranks: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, etc.). Cluster analysis is the formal study of algorithms and m ..."
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Cited by 294 (7 self)
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Organizing data into sensible groupings is one of the most fundamental modes of understanding and learning. As an example, a common scheme of scientific classification puts organisms into taxonomic ranks: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, etc.). Cluster analysis is the formal study of algorithms and methods for grouping, or clustering, objects according to measured or perceived intrinsic characteristics or similarity. Cluster analysis does not use category labels that tag objects with prior identifiers, i.e., class labels. The absence of category information distinguishes data clustering (unsupervised learning) from classification or discriminant analysis (supervised learning). The aim of clustering is exploratory in nature to find structure in data. Clustering has a long and rich history in a variety of scientific fields. One of the most popular and simple clustering algorithms, K-means, was first published in 1955. In spite of the fact that K-means was proposed over 50 years ago and thousands of clustering algorithms have been published since then, K-means is still widely used. This speaks to the difficulty of designing a general purpose clustering algorithm and the illposed problem of clustering. We provide a brief overview of clustering, summarize well known clustering methods, discuss the major challenges and key issues in designing clustering algorithms, and point out some of the emerging and useful research directions, including semi-supervised clustering, ensemble clustering, simultaneous feature selection, and data clustering and large scale data clustering.
Statistical properties of community structure in large social and information networks
"... A large body of work has been devoted to identifying community structure in networks. A community is often though of as a set of nodes that has more connections between its members than to the remainder of the network. In this paper, we characterize as a function of size the statistical and structur ..."
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Cited by 246 (14 self)
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A large body of work has been devoted to identifying community structure in networks. A community is often though of as a set of nodes that has more connections between its members than to the remainder of the network. In this paper, we characterize as a function of size the statistical and structural properties of such sets of nodes. We define the network community profile plot, which characterizes the “best ” possible community—according to the conductance measure—over a wide range of size scales, and we study over 70 large sparse real-world networks taken from a wide range of application domains. Our results suggest a significantly more refined picture of community structure in large real-world networks than has been appreciated previously. Our most striking finding is that in nearly every network dataset we examined, we observe tight but almost trivial communities at very small scales, and at larger size scales, the best possible communities gradually “blend in ” with the rest of the network and thus become less “community-like.” This behavior is not explained, even at a qualitative level, by any of the commonly-used network generation models. Moreover, this behavior is exactly the opposite of what one would expect based on experience with and intuition from expander graphs, from graphs that are well-embeddable in a low-dimensional structure, and from small social networks that have served as testbeds of community detection algorithms. We have found, however, that a generative model, in which new edges are added via an iterative “forest fire” burning process, is able to produce graphs exhibiting a network community structure similar to our observations.
Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography
, 2007
"... In a social network, nodes correspond to people or other social entities, and edges correspond to social links between them. In an effort to preserve privacy, the practice of anonymization replaces names with meaningless unique identifiers. We describe a family of attacks such that even from a singl ..."
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Cited by 220 (2 self)
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In a social network, nodes correspond to people or other social entities, and edges correspond to social links between them. In an effort to preserve privacy, the practice of anonymization replaces names with meaningless unique identifiers. We describe a family of attacks such that even from a single anonymized copy of a social network, it is possible for an adversary to learn whether edges exist or not between specific targeted pairs of nodes.
SybilLimit: A nearoptimal social network defense against sybil attacks
- 2008 [Online]. Available: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~yuhf/sybillimit-tr.pdf
"... Abstract—Open-access distributed systems such as peer-to-peer systems are particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks, where a malicious user creates multiple fake identities (called sybil nodes). Without a trusted central authority that can tie identities to real human beings, defending against sybil ..."
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Cited by 216 (7 self)
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Abstract—Open-access distributed systems such as peer-to-peer systems are particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks, where a malicious user creates multiple fake identities (called sybil nodes). Without a trusted central authority that can tie identities to real human beings, defending against sybil attacks is quite challenging. Among the small number of decentralized approaches, our recent SybilGuard protocol leverages a key insight on social networks to bound the number of sybil nodes accepted. Despite its promising direction, SybilGuard can allow a large number of sybil nodes to be accepted. Furthermore, SybilGuard assumes that social networks are fast-mixing, which has never been confirmed in the real world. This paper presents the novel SybilLimit protocol that leverages the same insight as SybilGuard, but offers dramatically improved and near-optimal guarantees. The number of sybil nodes accepted is reduced by a factor of 2 ( p n), or around 200 times in our experiments for a million-node system. We further prove that SybilLimit’s guarantee is at most a log n factor away from optimal when considering approaches based on fast-mixing social networks. Finally, based on three large-scale real-world social networks, we provide the first evidence that real-world social networks are indeed fast-mixing. This validates the fundamental assumption behind SybilLimit’s and SybilGuard’s approach. Index Terms—Social networks, sybil attack, sybil identities, SybilGuard, SybilLimit. I.
Community structure in large networks: Natural cluster sizes and the absence of large well-defined clusters
, 2008
"... A large body of work has been devoted to defining and identifying clusters or communities in social and information networks, i.e., in graphs in which the nodes represent underlying social entities and the edges represent some sort of interaction between pairs of nodes. Most such research begins wit ..."
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Cited by 208 (17 self)
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A large body of work has been devoted to defining and identifying clusters or communities in social and information networks, i.e., in graphs in which the nodes represent underlying social entities and the edges represent some sort of interaction between pairs of nodes. Most such research begins with the premise that a community or a cluster should be thought of as a set of nodes that has more and/or better connections between its members than to the remainder of the network. In this paper, we explore from a novel perspective several questions related to identifying meaningful communities in large social and information networks, and we come to several striking conclusions. Rather than defining a procedure to extract sets of nodes from a graph and then attempt to interpret these sets as a “real ” communities, we employ approximation algorithms for the graph partitioning problem to characterize as a function of size the statistical and structural properties of partitions of graphs that could plausibly be interpreted as communities. In particular, we define the network community profile plot, which characterizes the “best ” possible community—according to the conductance measure—over a wide range of size scales. We study over 100 large real-world networks, ranging from traditional and on-line social networks, to technological and information networks and
Microscopic Evolution of Social Networks
, 2008
"... We present a detailed study of network evolution by analyzing four large online social networks with full temporal information about node and edge arrivals. For the first time at such a large scale, we study individual node arrival and edge creation processes that collectively lead to macroscopic pr ..."
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Cited by 206 (10 self)
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We present a detailed study of network evolution by analyzing four large online social networks with full temporal information about node and edge arrivals. For the first time at such a large scale, we study individual node arrival and edge creation processes that collectively lead to macroscopic properties of networks. Using a methodology based on the maximum-likelihood principle, we investigate a wide variety of network formation strategies, and show that edge locality plays a critical role in evolution of networks. Our findings supplement earlier network models based on the inherently non-local preferential attachment. Based on our observations, we develop a complete model of network evolution, where nodes arrive at a prespecified rate and select their lifetimes. Each node then independently initiates edges according to a “gap” process, selecting a destination for each edge according to a simple triangle-closing model free of any parameters. We show analytically that the combination of the gap distribution with the node lifetime leads to a power law out-degree distribution that accurately reflects the true network in all four cases. Finally, we give model parameter settings that allow automatic evolution and generation of realistic synthetic networks of arbitrary scale.
Differences in the Mechanics of Information Diffusion Across Topics: Idioms, Political Hashtags, and Complex Contagion on Twitter. WWW
, 2011
"... ABSTRACT There is a widespread intuitive sense that different kinds of information spread differently on-line, but it has been difficult to evaluate this question quantitatively since it requires a setting where many different kinds of information spread in a shared environment. Here we study this ..."
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Cited by 171 (4 self)
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ABSTRACT There is a widespread intuitive sense that different kinds of information spread differently on-line, but it has been difficult to evaluate this question quantitatively since it requires a setting where many different kinds of information spread in a shared environment. Here we study this issue on Twitter, analyzing the ways in which tokens known as hashtags spread on a network defined by the interactions among Twitter users. We find significant variation in the ways that widely-used hashtags on different topics spread. Our results show that this variation is not attributable simply to differences in "stickiness," the probability of adoption based on one or more exposures, but also to a quantity that could be viewed as a kind of "persistence" -the relative extent to which repeated exposures to a hashtag continue to have significant marginal effects. We find that hashtags on politically controversial topics are particularly persistent, with repeated exposures continuing to have unusually large marginal effects on adoption; this provides, to our knowledge, the first large-scale validation of the "complex contagion" principle from sociology, which posits that repeated exposures to an idea are particularly crucial when the idea is in some way controversial or contentious. Among other findings, we discover that hashtags representing the natural analogues of Twitter idioms and neologisms are particularly non-persistent, with the effect of multiple exposures decaying rapidly relative to the first exposure. We also study the subgraph structure of the initial adopters for different widely-adopted hashtags, again finding structural differences across topics. We develop simulation-based and generative models to analyze how the adoption dynamics interact with the network structure of the early adopters on which a hashtag spreads.
Complex contagion and the weakness of long ties
, 2005
"... Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Recent research on “small worlds ” shows that remarkably few long ties are needed to give large and highly clustered populations the “degrees of separatio ..."
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Cited by 165 (9 self)
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Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Recent research on “small worlds ” shows that remarkably few long ties are needed to give large and highly clustered populations the “degrees of separation ” of a random network, in which information can rapidly diffuse. We test whether this effect of long ties generalizes from simple to complex contagions – those in which the credibility of information or the willingness to adopt an innovation requires independent confirmation from multiple sources. Using Watts and Strogatz’s original small world model, we demonstrate that long ties may not only fail to speed up complex contagions, they can even preclude diffusion entirely. Results suggest that the spread of collective actions, social movements, and risky innovations benefit not from ties that are long but from bridges that are wide enough to transmit strong social reinforcement. Balance theory shows how wide bridges might also form in evolving networks, but this turns out to have surprisingly little effect on the propagation of complex contagions. We find that
Feedback Effects between Similarity and Social Influence in Online Communities
"... A fundamental open question in the analysis of social networks is to understand the interplay between similarity and social ties. People are similar to their neighbors in a social network for two distinct reasons: first, they grow to resemble their current friends due to social influence; and second ..."
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Cited by 164 (8 self)
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A fundamental open question in the analysis of social networks is to understand the interplay between similarity and social ties. People are similar to their neighbors in a social network for two distinct reasons: first, they grow to resemble their current friends due to social influence; and second, they tend to form new links to others who are already like them, a process often termed selection by sociologists. While both factors are present in everyday social processes, they are in tension: social influence can push systems toward uniformity of behavior, while selection can lead to fragmentation. As such, it is important to understand the relative effects of these forces, and this has been a challenge due to the difficulty of isolating and quantifying them in real settings. We develop techniques for identifying and modeling the interactions between social influence and selection, using data from online communities where both social interaction and changes in behavior over time can be measured. We find clear feedback effects between the two factors, with rising similarity between two individuals serving, in aggregate, as an indicator of future interaction — but with similarity then continuing to increase steadily, although at a slower rate, for long periods after initial interactions. We also consider the relative value of similarity and social influence in modeling future behavior. For instance, to predict the activities that an individual is likely to do next, is it more useful to know
