Dynamics of bloggers’ communities: Bipartite networks from empirical data and agent-based modeling

We present an analysis of the empirical data and the agent-based modeling of the emotional behavior of users on the Web portals where the user interaction is mediated by posted comments, like Blogs and Diggs. We consider the dataset of discussion-driven popular Diggs, in which all comments are screened by machine-learning emotion detection in the text, to determine positive and negative valence (attractiveness and aversiveness) of each comment. By mapping the data onto a suitable bipartite network, we perform an analysis of the network topology and the related time-series of the emotional comments. The agent-based model is then introduced to simulate the dynamics and to capture the emergence of the emotional behaviors and communities. The agents are linked to posts on a bipartite network, whose structure evolves through their actions on the posts. The emotional states (arousal and valence) of each agent fluctuate in time, subject to the current contents of the posts to which the agent is exposed. By an agent’s action on a post its current emotions are transferred to the post. The model rules and the key parameters are inferred from the considered empirical data to ensure their realistic values and mutual consistency. The model assumes that the emotional arousal over posts drives the agent’s action. The simulations are preformed for the case of constant flux of agents and the results are analyzed in full analogy with the empirical data. The main conclusions are that the emotion-driven dynamics leads to long-range temporal correlations and emergent networks with community structure, that are comparable with the ones in the empirical system of popular posts. In view of pure emotion-driven agents actions, this type of comparisons provide a quantitative measure for the role of emotions in the dynamics on real blogs. Furthermore, the model reveals the underlying mechanisms which relate the post popularity with the emotion dynamics and the prevalence of negative emotions (critique). We also demonstrate how the community structure is tuned by varying a relevant parameter in the model. All data used in these works are fully anonymized.     

Bloggers behavior and emergent communities in Blog space

Interactions between users in cyberspace may lead to phenomena different from those observed in common social networks. Here we analyse large data sets about users and Blogs which they write and comment, mapped onto a bipartite graph. In such enlarged Blog space we trace user activity over time, which results in robust temporal patterns of user-Blog behavior and the emergence of communities. With the spectral methods applied to the projection on weighted user network we detect clusters of users related to their common interests and habits. Our results suggest that different mechanisms may play the role in the case of very popular Blogs. Our analysis makes a suitable basis for theoretical modeling of the evolution of cyber communities and for practical study of the data, in particular for an efficient search of interesting Blog clusters and further retrieval of their contents by text analysis.     

Negative emotions boost user activity at BBC forum

We present an empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums, measured by the number of posts written by individual debaters and the average sentiment of these posts. Nearly 2.5 million posts from over 18 thousand users were investigated. Scale-free distributions were observed for activity in individual discussion threads as well as for overall activity. The number of unique users in a thread normalized by the thread length decays with thread length, suggesting that thread life is sustained by mutual discussions rather than by independent comments. Automatic sentiment analysis shows that most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in individual threads express predominantly negative sentiments. It follows that the average emotion of longer threads is more negative and that threads can be sustained by negative comments. An agent-based computer simulation model has been used to reproduce several essential characteristics of the analyzed system. The model stresses the role of discussions between users, especially emotionally laden quarrels between supporters of opposite opinions, and represents many observed statistics of the forum.     

Competition for popularity in bipartite networks

We present a dynamical model for rewiring and attachment in bipartite networks. Edges are placed between nodes that belong to catalogs that can either be fixed in size or growing in size. The model is motivated by an empirical study of data from the video rental service Netflix, which invites its users to give ratings to the videos available in its catalog. We find that the distribution of the number of ratings given by users and that of the number of ratings received by videos both follow a power law with an exponential cutoff. We also examine the activity patterns of Netflix users and find bursts of intense video-rating activity followed by long periods of inactivity. We derive ordinary differential equations to model the acquisition of edges by the nodes over time and obtain the corresponding time-dependent degree distributions. We then compare our results with the Netflix data and find good agreement. We conclude with a discussion of how catalog models can be used to study systems in which agents are forced to choose, rate, or prioritize their interactions from a large set of options.     

Collaborative filtering based on multi-channel diffusion

In this paper, by applying a diffusion process, we propose a new index to quantify the similarity between two users in a user-object bipartite graph. To deal with the discrete ratings on objects, we use a multi-channel representation where each object is mapped to several channels with the number of channels being equal to the number of different ratings. Each channel represents a certain rating and a user having voted an object will be connected to the channel corresponding to the rating. Diffusion process taking place on such a user-channel bipartite graph gives a new similarity measure of user pairs, which is further demonstrated to be more accurate than the classical Pearson correlation coefficient under the standard collaborative filtering framework.     

Identifying missing and spurious connections via the bi-directional diffusion on bipartite networks

Link prediction and spurious link detection in complex networks have attracted increasing attention from both physical and computer science communities, due to their wide applications in many real systems. Related previous works mainly focus on monopartite networks while these problems in bipartite networks are not yet systematically addressed. Containing two different kinds of nodes, bipartite networks are essentially different from monopartite networks, especially in node similarity calculation: the similarity between nodes of different kinds (called inter-similarity) is not well defined. In this letter, we employ the local diffusion processes to measure the inter-similarity in bipartite networks. We find that the inter-similarity is asymmetric if the diffusion is applied in different directions. Accordingly, we propose a bi-directional hybrid diffusion method which is shown to achieve higher accuracy than the existing diffusion methods in identifying missing and spurious links in bipartite networks.     

Interactive System for Similarity-Based Inspection and Assessment of the Well-Being of mHealth Users

Recent digitization technologies empower mHealth users to conveniently record their Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) through web applications, smartphones, and wearable devices. These recordings can help clinicians understand how the users’ condition changes, but appropriate learning and visualization mechanisms are required for this purpose. We propose a web-based visual analytics tool, which processes clinical data as well as EMAs that were recorded through a mHealth application. The goals we pursue are (1) to predict the condition of the user in the near and the far future, while also identifying the clinical data that mostly contribute to EMA predictions, (2) to identify users with outlier EMA, and (3) to show to what extent the EMAs of a user are in line with or diverge from those users similar to him/her. We report our findings based on a pilot study on patient empowerment, involving tinnitus patients who recorded EMAs with the mHealth app TinnitusTips. To validate our method, we also derived synthetic data from the same pilot study. Based on this setting, results for different use cases are reported.     

Mobility-aware coded caching in D2D communication networks

In this paper, we consider a cache-enable device-to-device (D2D) communication network with user mobility and design a mobility-aware coded caching scheme to exploit multicasting opportunities for reducing network traffic. In addition to the static cache memory that can be used to reap coded caching gains, we assign a dynamic cache memory to mobile users such that users who never meet can still exchange contents via relaying. We consider content exchange as an information flow among dynamic cache memories of mobile users and leverage network coding to reduce network traffic. Specifically, we transfer our storage and broadcast problem into a network coding problem. By solving the formulated network coding problem, we obtain a dynamic content replacement and broadcast strategy. Numerical results verify that our algorithm significantly outperforms the random and greedy algorithms in terms of the amount of broadcasting data, and the standard Ford–Fulkerson algorithm in terms of the successful decoding ratio.     

Effect of the social influence on topological properties of user-object bipartite networks

Social influence plays an important role in analyzing online users’ collective behaviors[Salganik et al., Science 311, 854 (2006)]. However, the effect of the socialinfluence from the viewpoint of theoretical model is missing. In this paper, by takinginto account the social influence and users’ preferences, we develop a theoretical modelto analyze the topological properties of user-object bipartite networks, including thedegree distribution, average nearest neighbor degree and the bipartite clusteringcoefficient, as well as topological properties of the original user-object networks andtheir unipartite projections. According to the users’ preferences and the global rankingeffect, we analyze the theoretical results for two benchmark data sets, Amazon andBookcrossing, which are approximately consistent with the empirical results. This worksuggests that this model is feasible to analyze topological properties of bipartitenetworks in terms of the social influence and the users’ preferences.     

Characterizing and modeling an electoral campaign in the context of Twitter: 2011 Spanish Presidential election as a case study

Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians' main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians' actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such activity is correlated with the election results. We introduce a new measure to study political sentiment in Twitter, which we call the relative support. We have also characterized user behavior by analyzing the structural and dynamical patterns of the complex networks emergent from the mention and retweet networks. Our results suggest that the collective attention is driven by a very small fraction of users. Furthermore, we have analyzed the interactions taking place among politicians, observing a lack of debate. Finally, we develop a network growth model to reproduce the interactions taking place among politicians.     

Detecting Communities by Revised Max-flow Method in Networks

A ubiquitous phenomenon in networks is the presence of communities within which the network connections are dense and between which they are sparser. This paper proposes a max-flow algorithm in bipartite networks to detect communities in general networks. Firstly, we construct a bipartite network in accordance with a general network and derive a revised max-flow problem in order to uncover the community structure. Then we present a local heuristic algorithm to find the optimal solution of the revised max-flow problem. This method is applied to a variety of real-world and artificial complex networks, and the partition results confirm its effectiveness and accuracy.     

Detecting Communities by Revised Max-flow Method in Networks

A ubiquitous phenomenon in networks is the presence of communities within which the network connections are dense and between which they are sparser.This paper proposes a max-flow algorithm in bipartite networks to detect communities in general networks.Firstly,we construct a bipartite network in accordance with a general network and derive a revised max-flow problem in order to uncover the community structure.Then we present a local heuristic algorithm to find the optimal solution of the revised max-flow problem.This method is applied to a variety of real-world and artificial complex networks,and the partition results confirm its effectiveness and accuracy.     

An agent-based model of collective emotions in online communities

We develop an agent-based framework to model the emergence of collective emotions, which is applied to online communities. Agent’s individual emotions are described by their valence and arousal. Using the concept of Brownian agents, these variables change according to a stochastic dynamics, which also considers the feedback from online communication. Agents generate emotional information, which is stored and distributed in a field modeling the online medium. This field affects the emotional states of agents in a non-linear manner. We derive conditions for the emergence of collective emotions, observable in a bimodal valence distribution. Dependent on a saturated or a superlinear feedback between the information field and the agent’s arousal, we further identify scenarios where collective emotions only appear once or in a repeated manner. The analytical results are illustrated by agent-based computer simulations. Our framework provides testable hypotheses about the emergence of collective emotions, which can be verified by data from online communities.     

Three methods to distill multipartite entanglement over bipartite noisy channels

We first assume that there are only bipartite noisy qubit channels in a given multipartite system, and present three methods to distill the general Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. By investigating the methods, we show that multipartite entanglement distillation by bipartite entanglement distillation has higher yield than ones in the previous multipartite entanglement distillations.     

Comparison of methods for the detection of node group membership in bipartite networks

Most real-world networks considered in the literature have a modular structure. Analysis of these real-world networks often are performed under the assumption that there is only one type of node. However, social and biochemical systems are often bipartite networks, meaning that there are two exclusive sets of nodes, and that edges run exclusively between nodes belonging to different sets. Here we address the issue of module detection in bipartite networks by comparing the performance of two classes of group identification methods – modularity maximization and clique percolation – on an ensemble of modular random bipartite networks. We find that the modularity maximization methods are able to reliably detect the modular bipartite structure, and that, under some conditions, the simulated annealing method outperforms the spectral decomposition method. We also find that the clique percolation methods are not capable of reliably detecting the modular bipartite structure of the bipartite model networks considered.     

移动计算环境下远程用户体验数据挖掘方法研究

在移动计算环境下,通过对远程用户的体验数据优化挖掘,满足远程用户的个性化需求,提高对远程用户QoS服务质量。传统的数据挖掘方法采用显著特征关联信息提取算法,当远程用户体验数据之间的差异性特征不明显时,挖掘的准确性不好。提出一种基于关联用户自适应链路跟踪补偿的移动计算环境下远程用户体验数据挖掘模型,进行远程用户体验数据挖掘模型的总体设计和数据结构特征分析,对采集的远程用户体验数据进行非线性时间序列分解,对数据序列通过自相关特征匹配和特征压缩实现挖掘数据的指向性信息优化提取,采用关联用户自适应链路跟踪补偿方法实现对数据挖掘误差的控制和补偿,提高了数据挖掘的准确性和有效性。仿真结果表明,采用该挖掘方法进行移动计算环境下远程用户体验数据挖掘的准确度高,实时性较好,满足了移动远程用户的个性化需求,提高了对用户服务的针对性。     

Social and place-focused communities in location-based online social networks

Thanks to widely available, cheap Internet access and the ubiquity of smartphones,millions of people around the world now use online location-based social networkingservices. Understanding the structural properties of these systems and their dependenceupon users’ habits and mobility has many potential applications, including resourcerecommendation and link prediction. Here, we construct and characterise social andplace-focused graphs by using longitudinal information about declared social relationshipsand about users’ visits to physical places collected from a popular online location-basedsocial service. We show that although the social and place-focused graphs are constructedfrom the same data set, they have quite different structural properties. We find that thesocial and location-focused graphs have different global and meso-scale structure, and inparticular that social and place-focused communities have negligible overlap.Consequently, group inference based on community detection performed on the social graphalone fails to isolate place-focused groups, even though these do exist in the network. Bystudying the evolution of tie structure within communities, we show that the time periodover which location data are aggregated has a substantial impact on the stability ofplace-focused communities, and that information about place-based groups may be moreuseful for user-centric applications than that obtained from the analysis of socialcommunities alone.     

Statistics of co-occurring keywords in confined text messages on Twitter

Online social media such as the micro-blogging site Twitter has become a rich source of real-time data on online human behaviors. Here we analyze the occurrence and co-occurrence frequency of keywords in user posts on Twitter. From the occurrence rate of major international brand names, we provide examples of predictions of brand-user behaviors. From the co-occurrence rates, we further analyze the user-perceived relationships between international brand names and construct the corresponding relationship networks. In general the user activity on Twitter is highly intermittent and we show that the occurrence rate of brand names forms a highly correlated time signal.     

Balancing the popularity bias of object similarities for personalised recommendation

Network-based similarity measures have found wide applications in recommendation algorithms and made significant contributions for uncovering users’ potential interests. However, existing measures are generally biased in terms of popularity, that the popular objects tend to have more common neighbours with others and thus are considered more similar to others. Such popularity bias of similarity quantification will result in the biased recommendations, with either poor accuracy or poor diversity. Based on the bipartite network modelling of the user-object interactions, this paper firstly calculates the expected number of common neighbours of two objects with given popularities in random networks. A Balanced Common Neighbour similarity index is accordingly developed by removing the random-driven common neighbours, estimated as the expected number, from the total number. Recommendation experiments in three data sets show that balancing the popularity bias in a certain degree can significantly improve the recommendations’ accuracy and diversity simultaneously.     

Analysis of telephone network traffic based on a complex user network

The traffic in telephone networks is analyzed in this paper. Unlike the classical traffic analysis where call blockings are due to the limited channel capacity, we consider here a more realistic cause for call blockings which is due to the way in which users are networked in a real-life human society. Furthermore, two kinds of user network, namely, the fully connected user network and the scale-free network, are employed to model the way in which telephone users are connected. We show that the blocking probability is generally higher in the case of the scale-free user network, and that the carried traffic intensity is practically limited not only by the network capacity but also by the property of the user network.