An Experimental Study of Structural Diversity in Social Networks

@inproceedings{Su2020AnES,
  title={An Experimental Study of Structural Diversity in Social Networks},
  author={Jessica Su and Krishna Yeswanth Kamath and Aneesh Sharma and Johan Ugander and Sharad Goel},
  booktitle={ICWSM},
  year={2020}
}
Several recent studies of online social networking platforms have found that adoption rates and engagement levels are positively correlated with structural diversity, the degree of heterogeneity among an individual's contacts as measured by network ties. One common theory for this observation is that structural diversity increases utility, in part because there is value to interacting with people from different network components on the same platform. While compelling, evidence for this causal… 
[PDF] Semantic Reader
9 Citations
Background Citations
8

Figures from this paper

9 Citations

The Strength of Structural Diversity in Online Social Networks

This paper presents empirical evidence that the structural diversity of an individual is able to provide valuable insights to predict personal online social reputation, and the inclusion of a coexposure network provides an additional ingredient to achieve that goal.

Link recommendation algorithms and dynamics of polarization in online social networks

It is shown that preferentially establishing links with structurally similar nodes potentiates opinion polarization by stimulating network topologies with well-defined communities (even in the absence of opinion-based rewiring), and that connecting structurally dissimilar nodes moderates opinions.

Causal Network Motifs: Identifying Heterogeneous Spillover Effects in A/B Tests

This study provides an approach that accounts for both the local structure in a user’s social network via motifs as well as the treatment assignment conditions of neighbors, and proposes a tree-based algorithm for identifying different network interference conditions and estimating their average potential outcomes.

Measuring Friendship Closeness: A Perspective of Social Identity Theory

This work presents new measures for friendship closeness based on the social identity theory (SIT), which describes the inclination that a target endorses behaviors of users inside the same group and seamlessly reify the factors of SIT into quantitative measures, which consider local and global information of a target's group.

Experience-Driven Peer Effects: Evidence from a Large Natural Experiment

This work examines evidence from a large-scale online setting, game play records from League of Legends match-ups, where it is able to disentangle the effects of observing peer behavior from observing peer experience, and elucidate important heterogeneities in experience-driven peer effects.

Top-k Socio-Spatial Co-engaged Location Selection for Social Users

This paper forms a new problem of identifying top-k Socio-Spatial co-engaged Location Selection (SSLS) for users in a social graph, that selects the best set of k locations from a large number of location candidates relating to the user and her friends.

"Some other poor soul's problems": a peer recommendation intervention for health-related social support

A peer recommendation intervention to increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with peers is designed and the results support the usefulness and demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer recommendation interventions.

Non-Parametric Inference of Relational Dependence

This work proposes a consistent, non-parametric, scalable kernel test to operationalize the relational independence test for non-i.i.d. observational data under a set of structural assumptions and empirically evaluates the method on a variety of synthetic and semi-synthetic networks.

Algorithmic transparency and assessing effects of algorithmic ranking

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 38 REFERENCES

Tie Strength, Embeddedness, and Social Influence: A Large-Scale Networked Experiment

This work presents some of the first large-scale in vivo experimental evidence investigating the social and structural moderators of peer influence in networks, and finds that both embeddedness and tie strength increase influence.

Differential Network Effects on Economic Outcomes: A Structural Perspective

In a study of about 33,000 individuals in a south Asian country, we find that structural diversity, measured as the fraction of open triads in an ego-network, shows a relatively strong association…

Structural diversity in social contagion

This analysis of the growth of Facebook shows how data at the size and resolution of the Facebook network make possible the identification of subtle structural signals that go undetected at smaller scales yet hold pivotal predictive roles for the outcomes of social processes.

The Strength of Weak Ties

Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of…

The Effect of Recommendations on Network Structure

It is found that users across the popularity spectrum benefitted from the recommendations; however, the most popular users profited substantially more than average, and people are much more likely to respond positively to recommendations for popular users, amplifying the cumulative advantage of well-known individuals.

Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution

It is found that the propensity of individuals to join communities, and of communities to grow rapidly, depends in subtle ways on the underlying network structure, and decision-tree techniques are used to identify the most significant structural determinants of these properties.

On the Interplay between Social and Topical Structure

It is found that the hashtags that users adopt can predict their social relationships, and also that the social relationships between the initial adopters of a hashtag can predict the future popularity of that hashtag.

Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation

A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion.…

Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks

It is demonstrated that the future popularity of a meme can be predicted by quantifying its early spreading pattern in terms of community concentration, and the more communities a meme permeates, the more viral it is.

Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies

The authors demonstrate, with simple examples, that asymmetries in regression coefficients cannot identify causal effects and that very simple models of imitation can produce substantial correlations between an individual’s enduring traits and his or her choices, even when there is no intrinsic affinity between them.