Big Data Analytics

MS4252
Social Network Analysis II

Sources: Jennifer Golbeck 2013. Analyzing the Social Web.

Elsevier (chapter 4, 5, 6)

1
Chapter 4

NETWORK VISUALIZATION

2
 Information Visiualization
 Humans are wired to find pattern visually.
 Having natural ability to see anomalies, patterns,
clusters, and changes.
 Recognize many of these things without consciously
looking at them.

3
 Information Visiualization
 In visual data patterns can be recognized that may
otherwise be difficult to see in lists of numbers,
adjacency lists, or other textual representations of data.

 Information visualization deals with the presentation of

data in visual format.
 The data may be numeric, categorical, network data
(like social networks), text, and other types.

 Good information visualization supports users in better

understanding the data they are seeing.

4
 Information Visiualization
 Take advantage of humans’ natural abilities to see
 Patterns
 Anomalies
 Relationships
 Trend
 Clusters
 Overview of the complex data and explore more from
visualization!
 Visulizations are a qualitative way to begin
understanding the data.
 From there, quantitative experiments or analysis can follow to
explain any insights

5
 Graph Layout
 Network is made up of nodes and edges.
 How to laid out is critical to what an observer is able to
understand about a network.

 There are many types of layout algorithms that position

the nodes and edges in different ways for network
visulizaiton.
 Random layout
 Circular layout
 Grid layout
 Force-directed layout

6
 What makes a good visualization?
Criteria from Dunne and Shneiderman (2009)

 Every node is visible.

 For every node you can count its degree.
 For every link you can follow it from source to
destination.
 Clusters and outliers are identifiable.

7
Random layout

8
Circular layout

9
Grid layout

10
 Force directed layout
The layout is dynamic and determined by the connections
between the nodes.

11
 Visualizing network features
 Labels (node label and edge label; hard to show all the
labels even for small network)

 Size, Shape, and color

 Larger graph properties

12
 Size, Shape, and color
 Showing other attributes of nodes and edges in graphs
can be easier.
 Categorical or quantitative attributes are
particularly easy to show by adjustments in size,
shape, or colour.

 There are many statistics about the nodes in that

network:
 degree, centrality, and so on.
 These can be encoded using colour, size, or both.

13
 Node size and color
 A graph indicating degree with node color and clustering
coefficient with node size

14
 Edge weight
 Indicate the strength of a relationship, the
frequency of communication, or other factors.

15
 Large graph properties (clusters)
 Example: Youtube videos, where nodes represent videos
and edges connected video that share a common tag!

16
 Scale Issues
 Too many nodes (~ 10, 000 or more) or edges are
almost impossible to visualize.

 Dense network may not reveal patterns.

 Filtering for visualization is crucial!

17
 Example: Senate Voting Records
 Density can be a problem even the number of nodes is
small.
 Shows a network of members of the U.S. Senate.
 Senators voted
 There are only 100 nodes but over 4,100 edges
 Edge indicates the senators have voted the same way in
at least 40% of the time.

18
 Filtering for visual patterns
 One way to compensate for this is to filter the
networks when possible.
 Filter out the edges based on the weight
 Based on how many times senators have voted
together (at least two-thirds of the bills)

19
 Visualization Tools
 Gephi

 SAS Enterprise Miner (link analysis)

 R – we will use R!

 Python

20
Chapter 5

TIE STRENGTH

21
 Tie Strength
 Social relationships are complicated.

 The type of relationship people have will draw on many

things like their history and similarity, each person’s
personal background and preferences, environmental
factors, and more.

 Relationships are also multifaceted, and many

relationship types can be used in social network
analysis.
 One of the most useful is the idea of tie strength

22
 Tie Strength
 Measure of the strength of a relationship between
people (Mark Granovetter, 1973)

 `The strength of a tie is a combination of the

amount of time, the emotional intensity, the
intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal
services which characterize the tie’

23
 Tie Strength
 Two main types:
 Strong ties are rare, trusted and are usually family
members or very close friend.
 Usually people a person sees frequently, with whom one
shares personal details of one’s life, and for whom the
person will do and expect favours.
 Weak ties are much more common and include
acquaintances and more casual friendships.
 Co-workers or people who you know from a class but you
don’t spend a lot of time with

 A spectrum of tie strength, and any relationship

may fall along the scale from weak to strong.

24
 The strength of Weak Tie
 Tie strength is a very important factor to consider
in social network analysis.
 Consider the flow of information through a
network
 Weak ties often connect to diverse groups of people
with different perspectives
 These ties allow information to move throughout the
network
 E.g. A disease.
 Someone is more likely to catch a cold from a weak tie
 But because of the high level of close contact, it will
likely spread quickly to one’s strongest connections.

25
 The strength of Weak Tie
 NOT to say that tie strength is the only factor
influencing trust, reliability, and closeness in
social networks.

 Weak ties may provide highly trusted

information.

 E.g., a physician may be more trusted about medical

information than someone’s family members.

 The authority of the physician outweighs tie strength

26
 Replicating Migram’s `six degrees’
 Send booklets from original participants to a
target, unknown person.

 (Lin et al., 1978) show that successful chains

made heavy use of weak ties.

27
 The benefit of weak tie
 Connect people to different social circles,
exposing them to more information
 A person has more weak ties than strong ties.

28
 Tie strength and network
 To analyze tie strength in social network analysis,
the network must include relationship
information.

29
 Network Structure- forbidden triad
 What does that tell us about the relationship with
Bob and Chuck?
 Cannot draw any absolute conclusions
 Some sort of tie exists between B and C, either strong
or weak.
 Counter example: A is married to B and having
an affair with C?

30
 Network Structure – Bridge
 Many Forbidden triad can be found. i.e. PFO, PFH,
and PFN.
 The edge between P and F would no longer be a
bridge

31
 Tie Strength and Propagation
 Tie strength
 Strong tie – more trusted
 Weak tie – wider spread

 Network propagation
 a phenomenon where things spread through a network

 Diseases spreading through a social network,

 Computer viruses on the Internet, or
 Rumors and fads through a social network

32
Chapter 6

TRUST

33
 Definition – trust
 Trust is a relationship with which we are all
familiar, but which we rarely define or describe 。
 Load money
 We expect the person will pay us back
 Ask for a movie recommendation
 The person's recommendation will match our taste and the
movie or restaurant or hotel will be good
 Tell a secret
 The person will keep a secret, not tell others, and not
judge us for it
 Ask for a recommendation or reference
 The recommendation will be positive and help us get the
position we are applying to

34
 General definition
 Trust is putting oneself in a vulnerable position
based on the belief that another person will act
with our best interest in mind.

 Definition: `A person trusts another if she is

willing to take a risk based on her expectation
that the trusted person’s actions will lead to a
positive outcome’

35
 Development of trust
 Calculation-based trust:
 A rational decision about whether to trust someone,
where the costs and benefits of trusting are factored in.
 Personal-based trust:
 A person's propensity to trust, developed over the
course of their life.
 Cognition-based trust:
 The instant rapport and trust that can develop between
people who share similar backgrounds, beliefs, and
values
 Institution-based trust:
 How trust may form in the presence of guarantees and
protections offered by an institution.

36
 Asymmetry
 Trust is not necessarily identical in both directions.
 Extreme example: parents and children
 A child must have almost complete trust in his parent
while the parent should have very little trust in a child
(on substantive matters)

 More common asymmetries are smaller

 E.g. Bosses and employees
 Employees tend to trust superiors more

37
 Context and Time
 Trust will vary among contexts
 I may trust Bob to recommend a restaurant, but not to
repair my car.
 Trust can also transfer between contexts
 I may build trust in a co-worker that is entirely in work
context, but later trust that person to recommend a
plumber.

 Trust changes over time

 People tend to develop trust over time, but trust may
disappear completely if there has one dramatic failure.

38
 Measuring trust
 Measuring trust is important but difficult.

1. A person’s propensity to trust.

 This can be measured with a simple though experiment
called the Investment Game.

2. One person’s decision about the other person

39
 Trust in social media
 Apply these same estimates to people we know
online.

 Ask people explicitly to rate trust in others

 Customer rating

 Issue: most people online are strangers

 Find some way to leverage information that people have
shared about the trustworthiness of others to infer how
 much one person may trust a stranger

 Example: eBay
40
 Trust inference
 Infer trust between two unknown people using
network structure.
 If A-B have trust, and B-C have trust, how much
should A trust C?
?

A B C
𝑡 𝐴𝐵 𝑡 𝐵𝐶

41
 Trust inference algorithm
 Network-based Inference
 Use network structure to infer trust

 Example approach
 Find neighbors who are trusted.
 Ask them how much to trust the stranger.
 Average their responses weighted by how much we trust
each neighbor.
 Neighbors repeat this if they do not know the stranger.

 A lot of Algorithms to do this by computer scientists

42
 Network based inference
 Inferring over many paths?
 Favor highly trusted connections and short paths over
long ones

43
 Similarity based trust inference
 Research has shown that people who trust one
another tend to be similar (Ziegler and Golbeck,
2007).

 A person will trust his friend about movies if they have

similar taste.

 A parent will trust a babysitter to watch her child if they

have similar ideas about the appropriate way to care for
the child and respond in an emergency.

44
 Application of Trust
 Once trust is computed, how can we use it?

 Filtering information
 e.g. show reviews only from the most trusted people

45
 Application of Trust
 Sorting Information
 Show Facebook posts from my most trusted friends
first, and least trusted friends last

 Aggregating Information

 Give more weight to restaurant ratings from trustworthy

people and less weight to lower-trust people when
computing an average rating.

46