Q1.

Illustrate granovetter strenghth of weak ties Page 1

Answer

In Social Networks there are two kinds of relationships or ties :

• Strong Tie :
Strong relationship exists between close members with frequent interactions or
meetings. Example – family members and close friends cause strong ties.
• Weak Tie :
Weak relationship is caused by distant social relationships and very infrequent
meetings or interactions. Example – Acquaintances and strangers cause weak ties.

In a scenario, there is a person and he has 4 friends out of which 3 are in the same company
and 1 friend works in a different company. Now as shown in the figure, there occurs 2
communities, one in which Z and his 3 friends work and the other one friend works.

Figure – Strong and Weak Ties

In the above figure, the dotted line represents a weak tie and the plain line represents a strong tie.
Now, in 1973 a Stanford professor published a paper called the Strength of Weak Ties. According to
Granovetter’s paper, the strength of weak ties is said that each tie has its different perspective and
advantages as well and everyone talks about the advantages of strong ties but there are also some
advantages of weak ties as well which is absent in strong ties.

Example :
Out of 10 people, 9 people got their job or switched their job through the referral of a person
who is their friend’s friend or any other acquaintances and not their close friends. The reason
for that is not because their close friends do not want to but the real valid reason is that all the
close friends or we can say strong ties remain in the same group as you.

Like if you work in company XYZ, then most likely all your close friends work in the same
company, but your acquaintances are most likely to work in different companies. So while
switching companies your acquaintances can provide you the referral easily.

Assume I have 5 friends A, B, C, D, and E. Out of these 5 friends 4 (A, B, C, D) work in the
same place where I work and E works in a different company. Now almost all the
information that A, B, C, and D have is already known to me as we live in the same world.
 Page 2

But E is from a different world and that is why every information that E has is new to me
although E has a weak tie with me. So E is the one who helps me in getting new information
about the different world which increases my knowledge.

Figure – Example of Strong and Weak Ties

So strong ties are weak when it comes to information related to new jobs or job switch and weak
ties are strong in the same scenario.
Q.2 State the Emergence of Connectedness Page 3

The emergence of connectedness is to check whether the graph is connected or not. It says that
in a graph of N nodes, we just need NLogN edges to make graph connected.

Approach:

The following algorithm to be followed:

1. Take any random graph with N number of nodes.

2. Now choose any node as a starting node.
3. Now add random edges to the graph and check every time if the graph is connected or
not.
4. If the graph is not connected then repeat steps 2 and 3.
5. If the graph is connected then check the number of edges that are added and this will
be equal to NLogN.
6. Now check both the plots will be almost similar

Code for checking Connectedness

# Add N number of nodes in graph g

# and return the graph

def add_nodes(N):

g = nx.Graph()

g.add_nodes_from(range(N))

return g

def add_random_edge(g):

z1 = random.choice(g.nodes())

z2 = random.choice(g.nodes())

if z1 != z2:

g.add_edge(z1, z2)

return g

def continue_add_connectivity(g):

while(nx.is_connected(g) == False):

g = add_random_edge(g)

return g

def create_instance(N):
 g = add_nodes(N) page 4

g = continue_add_connectivity(g)

return g.number_of_edges()

def create_average_instance(N):

l = []

for i in range(0, 100):

l.append(create_instance(N))

return numpy.average(l)

def plot_connectivity():

a = []

b = []

# j is the number of nodes

j = 10

while (j <= 1000):

a.append(j)

b.append(create_average_instance(j))

i += 10

plt.xlabel('Number of nodes')

plt.ylabel('Number of edges required')

plt.title('Emergence of connectivity')

plt.plot(a, b)

plt.show()

a1 = []

b1 = []

j = 10

while (j <= 400):

a1.append(j)

b1.append(j*float(numpy.log(j)/2))

j += 10

plt.plot(a1, b1)

plt.show() next line Plote connectivity()

Q.3 illustrate triadic closure and clustering coefficient Page 5

Triadic Closure is a measure of the tendency of edges in a graph to form triangles. It's a measure of
the degree to which nodes in a graph tend to cluster together.
% matplotlib inline
seaborn.set_style("whitegrid")

sample_graph = networkx.Graph()
sample_graph.add_edges_from([(1, 2), (1, 3), (2, 4), (3, 5)])
networkx.draw_spring(sample_graph, with_labels=True)

Clustering Coefficient

The Clustering Coefficient is a measure of clustering for a single node. It is the number of pairs of a
node's friends that are themselves friends divided by the total number of pairs of a node's friends.
This can be interpreted as measuring how close the node's neighbors are to being a complete graph.

graph = networkx.Graph()
graph.add_edges_from([("A", "K"), ("A", "B"), ("A", "C"),
("B", "K"), ("B", "C"),
("C", "E"), ("C", "F"),
("D", "E"),
("E", "F"), ("E", "H"),
("F", "G"),
("I", "J")])

.. ggcode:: ipython

networkx.draw_spring(graph, with_labels=True)
Q.4 State Neighborhood Overlap Page 6
Q.5 Explain Homophily Page 7

This phenomenon is called Homophily (meaning love of the same) (McPherson et al. 2001).

Homophily can be directly observed in the virtual worlds using analytical techniques, for
example Huang et al (2009) showed that in the Massive Online Role-Playing Game
Everquest players tended to interact with other players of similar age, experience and who
lived near them in the real world. This held across all sorts of interactions, from questing
together to trading in the in game auction house. In fact the only way they looked for
Homophily and didn’t find it was in gender, something that they put down to the fact that
32% of people play the game with a romantic partner.
Homophily has predictive power in social media, so much so that researchers looking at
last.fm could predict real-life friendships by examining on-line interaction, shared interests
and location (Bischoff, 2012).
In fact homophily is so powerful a principle that whole communities on Facebook can be
modelled by extrapolating from as little as 20% of the population (Mislove et al. 2010). This
has real consequences for privacy and anonymity, as merely knowing your place in a network
may allow analysis tools to make guesses about your private information with high accuracy.
In Twitter De Choudhury (2011) has shown that different types of homophily hold for
different types of users (for example, normal users with roughly the same number of
followers and followed have location and sentiment homophily – i.e. they tend to live and
work near each other, and show similar reactions and views).
Homophily is a good example of where an existing social theory can now be explored
numerically, and be easily verified in a wide variety of different networks, because the data is
held digitally.
To what extent are the people that you friend/follow on your own social networks similar to
you? Are there exceptions, and do those exceptions contribute something of different value to
your personal network compared to people who are similar to you?
Q.6 introduction of positive and negative edges in social network Page 8

A positive edge between two nodes denotes a positive relationship (friendship, alliance, dating) and
a negative edge between two nodes denotes a negative relationship (hatred, anger). Signed social
network graphs can be used to predict the future evolution of the graph. In signed social networks,
there is the concept of "balanced" and "unbalanced" cycles. A balanced cycle is defined as a cycle
where the product of all the signs are positive. According to balance theory, balanced graphs
represent a group of people who are unlikely to change their opinions of the other people in the
group. Unbalanced graphs represent a group of people who are very likely to change their opinions
of the people in their group. For example, a group of 3 people (A, B, and C) where A and B have a
positive relationship, B and C have a positive relationship, but C and A have a negative relationship is
an unbalanced cycle. This group is very likely to morph into a balanced cycle, such as one where B
only has a good relationship with A, and both A and B have a negative relationship with C. By using
the concept of balanced and unbalanced cycles, the evolution of signed social network graphs can be
predicted.

Especially when using social network analysis as a tool for facilitating change, different approaches
of participatory network mapping have proven useful. Here participants / interviewers provide
network data by actually mapping out the network (with pen and paper or digitally) during the data
collection session. An example of a pen-and-paper network mapping approach, which also includes
the collection of some actor attributes (perceived influence and goals of actors) is the * Net-map
toolbox. One benefit of this approach is that it allows researchers to collect qualitative data and ask
clarifying questions while the network data is collected
Q.7 Discuss Cascade and Cluster Page 9

cascade

Cascades are described as periods during which individuals in a population exhibit herd-like
behaviour because they are making decisions based on the actions of other individuals rather than
relying on their own information about the problem. We will look at the two models of cascade:
decision based models and probabilistic models. In the decision based model, through a coordination
game, we will look at how a few individual’s behaviours can cascade through the network to decide
the norm. We will learn what the optimal strategies are when there is a playoff between two
incompatible competing systems, and also when bilinguality is allowed. We will also see some
studies which observes cascading in real-world networks.

While decision models looks at situations where cascade propagates due to the adoption of
behaviour, probabilistic models do not require the consent of an individual and instead looks at the
susceptibility of the individual to be part of the cascade. This model mainly looks at the spread of
diseases. Here, we will look at various concepts related to outbreak transmission. The focus will be
on the SIR, SIS and the SIRS epidemic models. Finally, the chapter looks at hashtag cascades in
Twitter, cascading of recommendations and the popularity of blogs in the Blogspace.

Cluster

Social networks are ubiquitous. The discovery of close-knit clusters in these networks is of
fundamental and practical interest. Existing clustering criteria are limited in that clusters typically do
not overlap, all vertices are clustered and/or external sparsity is ignored. We introduce a new
criterion that overcomes these limitations by combining internal density with external sparsity in a
natural way. An algorithm is given for provably finding the clusters, provided there is a sufficiently
large gap between internal density and external sparsity. Experiments on real social networks ill
ustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Q.8 Discuss the basic reproductive number page 10

The basic reproduction number R 0—the number of individuals directly infected by an infectious
person in an otherwise susceptible population—is arguably the most widely used estimator of how
severe an epidemic outbreak can be. This severity can be more directly measured as the fraction of
people infected once the outbreak is over, Ω. In traditional mathematical epidemiology and common
formulations of static network epidemiology, there is a deterministic relationship between R 0 and Ω.
However, if one considers disease spreading on a temporal contact network—where one knows
when contacts happen, not only between whom—then larger R 0 does not necessarily imply larger
Ω. In this paper, we numerically investigate the relationship between R 0 and Ω for a set of empirical
temporal networks of human contacts. Among 31 explanatory descriptors of temporal network
structure, we identify those that make R 0 an imperfect predictor of Ω. We find that descriptors
related to both temporal and topological aspects affect the relationship between R 0 and Ω, but in
different ways.

R0is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as
environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population. R0 values are usually
estimated from mathematical models, and the estimated values are dependent on the model used
and values of other parameters. Thus values given in the literature only make sense in the given
context and it is recommended not to use obsolete values or compare values based on different
models.[7] R0 does not by itself give an estimate of how fast an infection spreads in the population.