Events Calendar

NL Seminar- Farshad Kooti:Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes

Speaker: Farshad Kooti, USC/ ISI

Talk Title: Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Social networks have many counter-intuitive properties, including the “friendship paradox” that states, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Recently, a variety of other paradoxes were demonstrated in online social networks. This paper explores the origins of these network paradoxes. Specifically, we ask whether they arise from mathematical properties of the networks or whether they have a behavioral origin. We show that sampling from fat-tailed distributions always gives rise to a paradox in the mean, but not the median. We propose a strong form of network paradoxes, based on utilizing the median, and validate it empirically using data from two online social networks. Specifically, we show that for any user the majority of user’s friends and followers have more friends, followers, etc. than the user, and that this cannot be explained by statistical properties of sampling. Next, we explore the behavioral origins of the paradoxes by using the shuffle test to remove correlations between node degrees and attributes. We find that paradoxes for the mean persist in the shuffled network, but not for the median. We demonstrate that strong paradoxes arise due to the assortativity of user attributes, including degree, and correlation between degree and attribute.



Biography: Home Page:

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~kooti/

Host: Kevin Knight & Yang Gao

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey @ ISI-Info Sciences Inst.

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/