Folksonomies provide a rich source of data to study social patterns taking place on the World Wide Web. Here we study the temporal patterns of users tagging activity. We show that the statistical properties of inter-arrival times between subsequent tagging events cannot be explained without taking into account correlation in users behaviors. This shows that social interaction in collaborative tagging communities shapes the evolution of folksonomies. A consensus formation process involving the usage of a small number of tags for a given resources is observed through a numerical and analytical analysis of some well-known folksonomy datasets.
The dynamics of individuals is of essential importance for understanding the evolution of social systems. Most existing models assume that individuals in diverse systems, ranging from social networks to e-commerce, all tend to what is already popular. We develop an analytical time-aware framework which shows that when individuals make choices -- which item to buy, for example -- in online social systems, a small fraction of them is consistently successful in discovering popular items long before they actually become popular. We argue that these users, whom we refer to as discoverers, are fundamentally different from the previously known opinion leaders, influentials, and innovators. We use the proposed framework to demonstrate that discoverers are present in a wide range of systems. Once identified, they can be used to predict the future success of items. We propose a network model which reproduces the discovery patterns observed in the real data. Furthermore, data produced by the model pose a fundamental challenge to classical ranking algorithms which neglect the time of link creation and thus fail to discriminate between discoverers and ordinary users in the data. Our results open the door to qualitative and quantitative study of fine temporal patterns in social systems and have far-reaching implications for network modeling and algorithm design.
Ranking algorithms are pervasive in our increasingly digitized societies, with important real-world applications including recommender systems, search engines, and influencer marketing practices. From a network science perspective, network-based ranking algorithms solve fundamental problems related to the identification of vital nodes for the stability and dynamics of a complex system. Despite the ubiquitous and successful applications of these algorithms, we argue that our understanding of their performance and their applications to real-world problems face three fundamental challenges: (i) Rankings might be biased by various factors; (2) their effectiveness might be limited to specific problems; and (3) agents decisions driven by rankings might result in potentially vicious feedback mechanisms and unhealthy systemic consequences. Methods rooted in network science and agent-based modeling can help us to understand and overcome these challenges.
The probability distribution of number of ties of an individual in a social network follows a scale-free power-law. However, how this distribution arises has not been conclusively demonstrated in direct analyses of peoples actions in social networks. Here, we perform a causal inference analysis and find an underlying cause for this phenomenon. Our analysis indicates that heavy-tailed degree distribution is causally determined by similarly skewed distribution of human activity. Specifically, the degree of an individual is entirely random - following a maximum entropy attachment model - except for its mean value which depends deterministically on the volume of the users activity. This relation cannot be explained by interactive models, like preferential attachment, since the observed actions are not likely to be caused by interactions with other people.
In social tagging systems, the diversity of tag vocabulary and the popularity of such tags continue to increase as they are exposed to selection pressure derived from our cognitive nature and cultural preferences. This is analogous to living ecosystems, where mutation and selection play a dominant role. Such population dynamism, which yields a scaling law, is mathematically modeled by a simple stochastic process---the Yule--Simon process, which describes how new words are introduced to the system and then grow. However, in actual web services, we have observed that a large fluctuation emerges in the popularity growth of individual tags that cannot be explained by the ordinary selection mechanism. We introduce a scaling factor to quantify the degree of the deviation in the popularity growth from the mean-field solution of the Yule--Simon process, and we discuss possible triggers of such anomalous popularity behavior.
In social networks, individuals constantly drop ties and replace them by new ones in a highly unpredictable fashion. This highly dynamical nature of social ties has important implications for processes such as the spread of information or of epidemics. Several studies have demonstrated the influence of a number of factors on the intricate microscopic process of tie replacement, but the macroscopic long-term effects of such changes remain largely unexplored. Here we investigate whether, despite the inherent randomness at the microscopic level, there are macroscopic statistical regularities in the long-term evolution of social networks. In particular, we analyze the email network of a large organization with over 1,000 individuals throughout four consecutive years. We find that, although the evolution of individual ties is highly unpredictable, the macro-evolution of social communication networks follows well-defined statistical patterns, characterized by exponentially decaying log-variations of the weight of social ties and of individuals social strength. At the same time, we find that individuals have social signatures and communication strategies that are remarkably stable over the scale of several years.
Andrea Capocci
,Andrea Baldassarri
,Vito D. P. Servedio
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(2012)
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"Statistical Properties of Inter-arrival Times Distribution in Social Tagging Systems"
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Andrea Capocci
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