We provide a framework for modeling social network formation through conditional multinomial logit models from discrete choice and random utility theory, in which each new edge is viewed as a “choice” made by a node to connect to another node, based on (generic) features of the other nodes available to make a connection. This perspective on network formation unifies existing models such as preferential attachment, triadic closure, and node fitness, which are all special cases, and thereby provides a flexible means for conceptualizing, estimating, and comparing models. The lens of discrete choice theory also provides several new tools for analyzing social network formation; for example, the significance of node features can be evaluated in a statistically rigorous manner, and mixtures of existing models can be estimated by adapting known expectation-maximization algorithms. We demonstrate the flexibility of our framework through examples that analyze a number of synthetic and real-world datasets. For example, we provide rigorous methods for estimating preferential attachment models and show how to separate the effects of preferential attachment and triadic closure. Non-parametric estimates of the importance of degree show a highly linear trend, and we expose the importance of looking carefully at nodes with degree zero. Examining the formation of a large citation graph, we find evidence for an increased role of degree when accounting for age.
There is also a connection with the literature on link prediction in social networks @cite_9 . A network formation model implicitly makes claims about what edges are most likely to form next, and so can be evaluated by the same metrics as link prediction algorithms @cite_14 . Features like distance, common neighbors and degree have been shown to be predictive of link formation in multiple contexts @cite_9 @cite_29 . However, in that literature, the main focus of interest is usually predictive accuracy, rather than a robust understanding of the drivers of formation. While we use predictive accuracy as a measure of goodness of fit, we are more concerned with interpretability of the model and estimates, which is one of the advantages of the conditional logit model.
@cite_29 @cite_9 @cite_14
2157082398 2148847267 1979104937
In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text. One of the core tasks in social network analysis is to predict the formation of links (i.e. various types of relationships) over time. Previous research has generally represented the social network in the form of a graph and has leveraged topological and semantic measures of similarity between two nodes to evaluate the probability of link formation. Here we introduce a novel local probabilistic graphical model method that can scale to large graphs to estimate the joint co-occurrence probability of two nodes. Such a probability measure captures information that is not captured by either topological measures or measures of semantic similarity, which are the dominant measures used for link prediction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the co-occurrence probability feature by using it both in isolation and in combination with other topological and semantic features for predicting co-authorship collaborations on real datasets. Online social networks offering various services have become ubiquitous in our daily life. Meanwhile, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously to enjoy specific services provided by different networks. Formally, social networks that share some common users are named as partially aligned networks. In this paper, we want to predict the formation of social links in multiple partially aligned social networks at the same time, which is formally defined as the multi-network link (formation) prediction problem. In multiple partially aligned social networks, users can be extensively correlated with each other by various connections. To categorize these diverse connections among users, 7 "intra-network social meta paths" and 4 categories of "inter-network social meta paths" are proposed in this paper. These "social meta paths" can cover a wide variety of connection information in the network, some of which can be helpful for solving the multi-network link prediction problem but some can be not. To utilize useful connection, a subset of the most informative "social meta paths" are picked, the process of which is formally defined as "social meta path selection" in this paper. An effective general link formation prediction framework, Mli (Multi-network Link Identifier), is proposed in this paper to solve the multi-network link (formation) prediction problem. Built with heterogenous topological features extracted based on the selected "social meta paths" in the multiple partially aligned social networks, Mli can help refine and disambiguate the prediction results reciprocally in all aligned networks. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world partiall