Homophily and Influence in Social Networks

20 Dec 2011 21:00

See this post for an explanation of what this means, and the last section of my paper with Andrew Thomas (link below) for the technical/methodological questions which most interest me in this area.

Query: to what extent do the same problems show up when looking at other sorts of networks, say of neurons, or of gene regulatory elements?

Aris Anagnostopoulos, Ravi Kumar and Mohammad Mahdian, "Influence and Correlation in Social Networks", in KDD 2008 [Thanks to Dr. Madian for a preprint]
Sinan Aral, Lev Muchnik and Arun Sundararajan, "Distinguishing influence-based contagion from homophily-driven diffusion in dynamic networks", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 106 (2009): 21544--21549
Sumit Basu, Tanzeem Choudhury, Brian Clarkson and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, "Learning Human Interactions with the Influence Model", Media Lab Vision and Modeling Technical Report 539 (June 2001) [This is an interesting but rather special model for social influence: basically, one fits a model of pairwise influence for each dyad, and then predicts the behavior of a given individual by taking a weighted sum of the predictions of those models. So one needs to learn the pairwise model parameters and the prediction weights. Not at all obvious how to do specification testing in this framework... Thanks to Gustavo Lacerda and Kevin Murphy for the pointer]
Stephen Judd, Michael Kearns, and Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, "Behavioral dynamics and influence in networked coloring and consensus", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 14978--14982 [Comments under collective cognition]
Timothy La Fond and Jennifer Neville, "Randomization Tests for Distinguishing Social Influence and Homophily Effects", WWW 2010 [PDF reprint via Prof. Neville]
Roger Th. A. J. Leenders
- Structure and Influence: Statistical Models for the Dynamics of Actor Attributes, Network Structure and Their Interdependence [mini-review]
- "Modeling social influence through network autocorrelation: constructing the weight matrix", Social Networks 24 (2002): 21--47 [Basically, part of chapter 3 of his Structure and Influence --- mostly section 3.3. PDF preprint]
Russell Lyons, "The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis", Statistics, Politics, and Policy 2 (2011): 1, arxiv:1007.2876
Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Loving and James M. Cook, "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks", Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415--444
Hans Noel and Brendan Nyhan, "The ``Unfriending'' Problem: The Consequences of Homophily in Friendship Retention for Causal Estimates of Social Influence", Social Networks forthcoming (2011), arxiv:1009.3243
Greg Ver Steeg and Aram Galstyan, "Ruling out latent homophily in social networks", NIPS 2010 workshop on social computing [PDF]
Christian Steglich, Tom A. B. Snijders and Michael Pearson, "Dynamic Networks and Behavior: Separating Selection from Influence", Sociological Methodology 40 (2010): 329--392 [Preprint]
Tyler J. VanderWeele, "Sensitivity Analysis for Contagion Effects in Social Networks", Sociological Methods and Research 17 (2011): 240--255

CRS and Andrew C. Thomas, "Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies", Sociological Methods and Research 40 (2011): 211--239, arxiv:1004.4704

Damon Centola, "An Experimental Study of Homophily in the Adoption of Health Behavior", Science 334 (2011): 1269--1272
Damon Centola and Michael W. Macy, "Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties", American Journal of Sociology submitted [PDF preprint via Macy]
Yen-Sheng Chiang, "Birds of Moderately Different Feathers: Bandwagon Dynamics and the Threshold Heterogeneity of Network Neighbors", Journal of Mathematical Sociology 31 (2006): 47--69
Gregorio D'Agostino, Antonio Scala, Vinko Zlatic, Guido Caldarelli, "Assortativity Effects on Diffusion-like Processes in Scale-free Networks", arxiv:1105.3574
James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, "Cooperative Behaviour Cascades in Human Social Networks", arxiv:0908.3497
Noah E. Friedkin, A Structural Theory of Social Influence [Blurb]
Rumi Ghosh, Kristina Lerman, "Predicting Influential Users in Online Social Networks", arxiv:1005.4882
Benjamin Golub, Matthew O. Jackson, "How Homophily Affects Diffusion and Learning in Networks", arxiv:0811.4013
Robert Huckfeldt, Paul E. Johnson and John Sprague, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks
Nicholas Lanchier, "Opinion dynamics with confidence threshold: an alternative to the Axelrod model", arxiv:1003.0115
Marc Lelarge, "Diffusion and Cascading Behavior in Random Networks", arxiv:1012.2062
Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez and Jason Kaufman, "Social selection and peer influence in an online social network", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences forthcoming
Omar Lizardo, "How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks" [PDF preprint]
Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Felix Reed-Tsochas, "Spontaneous emergence of social influence in online systems", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 18375--18380
Fergal Reid, Neil Hurley, "Diffusion in Complex Networks With Overlapping Community Structure", arxiv:1105.5849
Tom A. B. Snijders, Johan Koskinen, and Michael Schweinberger, "Maximum likelihood estimation for social network dynamics", Annals of Applied Statistics 4 (2010): 567--588, arxiv:1011.1753
Christian Steglich, Philip Sinclair, Jo Holliday and Laurence Moore, "Actor-based analysis of peer influence in A Stop Smoking In Schools Trial (ASSIST)", Social Networks forthcoming (2010)
Christophe Van den Bulte and Gary L. Lilien, "Medical Innovation Revisited: Social Contagion versus Marketing Effort", American Journal of Sociology 106 (2001): 1409--1435 [JSTOR]
H. Peyton Young, "The diffusion of innovations in social networks", in L. E. Blume and S. N. Durlauf (eds.), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System III (2003)