As social networks evolve, new nodes are linked to the large-scale organization already in place. We show that the combination of two simple algorithms, one the Barabasi-Albert preferential attachment proposal and the other a neighbor attachment rule, successfully generate networks exhibiting both the local and global characteristics of empirical data on social network structures. Ideally, one might hope that some coarse features of this linking process and the form of the local patterns might enable the prediction of large-scale properties. We show that this is generally not the case. This might help explain the variety of local and global patterns in empirical networks.

Latent position network models are a versatile tool in network science; applications include clustering entities, controlling for causal confounders, and defining priors over unobserved graphs. Estimating each node’s latent position is typically framed as a Bayesian inference problem, with Metropolis within Gibbs being the most popular tool for approximating the posterior distribution. However, it is well-known that Metropolis within Gibbs is inefficient for large networks; the acceptance ratios are expensive to compute, and the resultant posterior draws are highly correlated. In this article, we propose an alternative Markov chain Monte Carlo strategy—defined using a combination of split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and Firefly Monte Carlo—that leverages the posterior distribution’s functional form for more efficient posterior computation. We demonstrate that these strategies outperform Metropolis within Gibbs and other algorithms on synthetic networks, as well as on real information-sharing networks of teachers and staff in a school district.

Previous studies have shown that relationship sentiments in families follow a pattern wherein either all maintain positive relationships or there are two antagonistic factions. This result is consistent with the network theory of structural balance that individuals befriend their friends’ friend and become enemies with their friends’ enemies. Fault lines in families would then endogenously emerge through the same kinds of interactional processes that organize nations into axis and allies. We argue that observed patterns may instead exogenously come about as the result of personal characteristics or homophilous partitions of family members. Disentangling these alternate theoretical possibilities requires longitudinal data. The present study tracks the sentiment dynamics of 1,710 families in a longitudinal panel study. Results show the same static patterns suggestive of balancing processes identified in earlier research, yet dynamic analysis reveals that conflict in families is not generated or resolved in accordance with balance theory.

Most community detection methods focus on clustering actors with common features in a network. However, clustering edges offers a more intuitive way to understand the network structure in many real-life applications. Among the existing methods for network edge clustering, the majority are algorithmic, with the exception of the latent space edge clustering (LSEC) model proposed by Sewell (Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 30(2), 390–405, 2021). LSEC was shown to have good performance in simulation and real-life data analysis, but fitting this model requires prior knowledge of the number of clusters and latent dimensions, which are often unknown to researchers. Within a Bayesian framework, we propose an extension to the LSEC model using a sparse finite mixture prior that supports automated selection of the number of clusters. We refer to our proposed approach as the automated LSEC or aLSEC. We develop a variational Bayes generalized expectation-maximization approach and a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo-within Gibbs algorithm for estimation. Our simulation study showed that aLSEC reduced run time by 10 to over 100 times compared to LSEC. Like LSEC, aLSEC maintains a computational cost that grows linearly with the number of actors in a network, making it scalable to large sparse networks. We developed the R package aLSEC which implements the proposed methodology.

A stream of research on co-authorship, used as a proxy of scholars’ collaborative behavior, focuses on members of a given scientific community defined at discipline and/or national basis for which co-authorship data have to be retrieved. Recent literature pointed out that international digital libraries provide partial coverage of the entire scholar scientific production as well as under-coverage of the scholars in the community. Bias in retrieving co-authorship data of the community of interest can affect network construction and network measures in several ways, providing a partial picture of the real collaboration in writing papers among scholars. In this contribution, we collected bibliographic records of Italian academic statisticians from an online platform (IRIS) available at most universities. Even if it guarantees a high coverage rate of our population and its scientific production, it is necessary to deal with some data quality issues. Thus, a web scraping procedure based on a semi-automatic tool to retrieve publication metadata, as well as data management tools to detect duplicate records and to reconcile authors, is proposed. As a result of our procedure, it emerged that collaboration is an active and increasing practice for Italian academic statisticians with some differences according to the gender, the academic ranking, and the university location of scholars. The heuristic procedure to accomplish data quality issues in the IRIS platform can represent a working case report to adapt to other bibliographic archives with similar characteristics.

This paper proposes that common measures for network transitivity, based on the enumeration of transitive triples, do not reflect the theoretical statements about transitivity they aim to describe. These statements are often formulated as comparative conditional probabilities, but these are not directly reflected by simple functions of enumerations. We think that a better approach is obtained by considering the probability of a tie between two randomly drawn nodes, conditional on selected features of the network. Two measures of transitivity based on correlation coefficients between the existence of a tie and the existence, or the number, of two-paths between the nodes are developed, and called “Transitivity Phi” and “Transitivity Correlation.” Some desirable properties for these measures are studied and compared to existing clustering coefficients, in both random (Erdös–Renyi) and in stylized networks (windmills). Furthermore, it is shown that in a directed graph, under the condition of zero Transitivity Correlation, the total number of transitive triples is determined by four underlying features: size, density, reciprocity, and the covariance between in- and outdegrees. Also, it is demonstrated that plotting conditional probability of ties, given the number of two-paths, provides valuable insights into empirical regularities and irregularities of transitivity patterns.

Exponential random graph models, or ERGMs, are a flexible and general class of models for modeling dependent data. While the early literature has shown them to be powerful in capturing many network features of interest, recent work highlights difficulties related to the models’ ill behavior, such as most of the probability mass being concentrated on a very small subset of the parameter space. This behavior limits both the applicability of an ERGM as a model for real data and inference and parameter estimation via the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. To address this problem, we propose a new exponential family of models for random graphs that build on the standard ERGM framework. Specifically, we solve the problem of computational intractability and “degenerate” model behavior by an interpretable support restriction. We introduce a new parameter based on the graph-theoretic notion of degeneracy, a measure of sparsity whose value is commonly low in real-world networks. The new model family is supported on the sample space of graphs with bounded degeneracy and is called degeneracy-restricted ERGMs, or DERGMs for short. Since DERGMs generalize ERGMs—the latter is obtained from the former by setting the degeneracy parameter to be maximal—they inherit good theoretical properties, while at the same time place their mass more uniformly over realistic graphs. The support restriction allows the use of new (and fast) Monte Carlo methods for inference, thus making the models scalable and computationally tractable. We study various theoretical properties of DERGMs and illustrate how the support restriction improves the model behavior. We also present a fast Monte Carlo algorithm for parameter estimation that avoids many issues faced by Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms used for inference in ERGMs.

A principled approach to understand networks is to formulate generative models and infer their parameters from given network data. Due to the scarcity of data in the form of multiple networks that have evolved from the same process, generative models are typically formulated to learn parameters from a single network observation, hence ignoring the natural variability of the “true” process. In this paper, we highlight the importance of variability in evaluating generative models and present two ways of quantifying the variability for a finite set of networks. The first evaluation scheme compares the statistical properties of networks in a dissimilarity space, while the other relies on data-driven entropy measures to compute variability in network populations. Using these measures, we evaluate the ability of four generative models to synthesize networks that capture the variability of the “true” process. Our empirical analysis suggests that generative models fitted for a single network observation fail to capture the variability in the network population. Our work highlights the need for rethinking the way we evaluate the goodness-of-fit of new and existing network models and devising models that are capable of matching the variability of network populations when available.

Individuals filling specialized, interdependent organizational roles achieve coordinated task execution through effective communication channels. Such channels enable regular access to information, opportunities, and assistance that may enhance one’s understanding of the task environment. However, the time and effort devoted to maintaining those channels may detract from one’s duties by turning attention away from the task environment. Disrupted task environments increase information requirements, thus creating a dilemma in which individuals must sustain benefits offered by important communication channels and relieve burdens imposed by ineffective channels. Using separable temporal exponential random graph models (STERGMs), this paper examines the relationship between situational awareness (SA) and the propensity to sustain or dissolve preexisting communication channels during 10 disruptive events experienced sequentially by a large, multifaceted military organization during a 2-week training exercise. Results provide limited evidence that increased SA detracts from tie preservation; instead SA begins to predict tie preservation during the second week of the exercise. Patterns of organizational adaptation reveal that, over time, improvised coordinative roles increasingly fall upon those with elevated SA. These results suggest that over successive disruptions, the benefits of information provided by communication channels within interdependent, role-specialized organizations begin to outweigh the costs of sustaining those channels.

Viral marketing campaigns target primarily those individuals who are central in social networks and hence have social influence. Marketing events, however, may attract diverse audience. Despite the importance of event marketing, the influence of heterogeneous target groups is not well understood yet. In this paper, we define the Audience Selection (AS) problem in which different sets of agents need to be evaluated and compared based on their social influence. A typical application of Audience selection is choosing locations for a series of marketing events. The Audience selection problem is different from the well-known Influence Maximization (IM) problem in two aspects. Firstly, it deals with sets rather than nodes. Secondly, the sets are diverse, composed by a mixture of influential and ordinary agents. Thus, Audience selection needs to assess the contribution of ordinary agents too, while IM only aims to find top spreaders. We provide a systemic test for ranking influence measures in the Audience Selection problem based on node sampling and on a novel statistical method, the Sum of Ranking Differences. Using a Linear Threshold diffusion model on two online social networks, we evaluate eight network measures of social influence. We demonstrate that the statistical assessment of these influence measures is remarkably different in the Audience Selection problem, when low-ranked individuals are present, from the IM problem, when we focus on the algorithm’s top choices exclusively.

We welcome our new editors and provide background on an unusual duo of articles in this issue.

Detecting communities in large-scale social networks is a challenging task where each vertex may belong to multiple communities. Such behavior of vertices and the implied strong overlaps among communities render many detection algorithms invalid. We develop a Partial Community Merger Algorithm (PCMA) for detecting communities with significant overlaps as well as slightly overlapping and disjoint ones. It is a bottom-up approach based on properly reassembling partial information of communities revealed in ego networks of vertices to reconstruct complete communities. We propose a novel similarity measure of communities and an efficient merger process to address the two key issues—noise control and merger order—in implementing this approach. PCMA is tested against two benchmarks and overall it outperforms all compared algorithms in both accuracy and efficiency. It is applied to two huge online social networks, Friendster and Sina Weibo. Millions of communities are detected and they are of higher qualities than the corresponding metadata groups. We find that the latter should not be regarded as the ground-truth of structural communities. The significant overlapping pattern found in the detected communities confirms the need of new algorithms, such as PCMA, to handle multiple memberships of vertices in social networks.

For interventions that affect how individuals interact, social network data may aid in understanding the mechanisms through which an intervention is effective. Social networks may even be an intermediate outcome observed prior to end of the study. In fact, social networks may also mediate the effects of the intervention on the outcome of interest, and Sweet (2019) introduced a statistical model for social networks as mediators in network-level interventions. We build on their approach and introduce a new model in which the network is a mediator using a latent space approach. We investigate our model through a simulation study and a real-world analysis of teacher advice-seeking networks.

As relational event models are an increasingly popular model for studying relational structures, the reliability of large-scale event data collection becomes more and more important. Automated or human-coded events often suffer from non-negligible false-discovery rates in event identification. And most sensor data are primarily based on actors’ spatial proximity for predefined time windows; hence, the observed events could relate either to a social relationship or random co-location. Both examples imply spurious events that may bias estimates and inference. We propose the Relational Event Model for Spurious Events (REMSE), an extension to existing approaches for interaction data. The model provides a flexible solution for modeling data while controlling for spurious events. Estimation of our model is carried out in an empirical Bayesian approach via data augmentation. Based on a simulation study, we investigate the properties of the estimation procedure. To demonstrate its usefulness in two distinct applications, we employ this model to combat events from the Syrian civil war and student co-location data. Results from the simulation and the applications identify the REMSE as a suitable approach to modeling relational event data in the presence of spurious events.

Even within well-studied organisms, many genes lack useful functional annotations. One way to generate such functional information is to infer biological relationships between genes or proteins, using a network of gene coexpression data that includes functional annotations. Signed distance correlation has proved useful for the construction of unweighted gene coexpression networks. However, transforming correlation values into unweighted networks may lead to a loss of important biological information related to the intensity of the correlation. Here, we introduce a principled method to construct weighted gene coexpression networks using signed distance correlation. These networks contain weighted edges only between those pairs of genes whose correlation value is higher than a given threshold. We analyze data from different organisms and find that networks generated with our method based on signed distance correlation are more stable and capture more biological information compared to networks obtained from Pearson correlation. Moreover, we show that signed distance correlation networks capture more biological information than unweighted networks based on the same metric. While we use biological data sets to illustrate the method, the approach is general and can be used to construct networks in other domains. Code and data are available on https://github.com/javier-pardodiaz/sdcorGCN.

We create a framework to analyze the timing and frequency of instantaneous interactions between pairs of entities. This type of interaction data is especially common nowadays and easily available. Examples of instantaneous interactions include email networks, phone call networks, and some common types of technological and transportation networks. Our framework relies on a novel extension of the latent position network model: we assume that the entities are embedded in a latent Euclidean space and that they move along individual trajectories which are continuous over time. These trajectories are used to characterize the timing and frequency of the pairwise interactions. We discuss an inferential framework where we estimate the individual trajectories from the observed interaction data and propose applications on artificial and real data.

Choices made by individuals have widespread impacts—for instance, people choose between political candidates to vote for, between social media posts to share, and between brands to purchase—moreover, data on these choices are increasingly abundant. Discrete choice models are a key tool for learning individual preferences from such data. Additionally, social factors like conformity and contagion influence individual choice. Traditional methods for incorporating these factors into choice models do not account for the entire social network and require hand-crafted features. To overcome these limitations, we use graph learning to study choice in networked contexts. We identify three ways in which graph learning techniques can be used for discrete choice: learning chooser representations, regularizing choice model parameters, and directly constructing predictions from a network. We design methods in each category and test them on real-world choice datasets, including county-level 2016 US election results and Android app installation and usage data. We show that incorporating social network structure can improve the predictions of the standard econometric choice model, the multinomial logit. We provide evidence that app installations are influenced by social context, but we find no such effect on app usage among the same participants, which instead is habit-driven. In the election data, we highlight the additional insights a discrete choice framework provides over classification or regression, the typical approaches. On synthetic data, we demonstrate the sample complexity benefit of using social information in choice models.

A number of theoretical results have provided sufficient conditions for the selection of payoff-efficient equilibria in games played on networks when agents imitate successful neighbors and make occasional mistakes (stochastic stability). However, those results only guarantee full convergence in the long-run, which might be too restrictive in reality. Here, we employ a more gradual approach relying on agent-based simulations avoiding the double limit underlying these analytical results. We focus on the circular-city model, for which a sufficient condition on the population size relative to the neighborhood size was identified by Alós-Ferrer & Weidenholzer [(2006) Economics Letters, 93, 163–168]. Using more than 100,000 agent-based simulations, we find that selection of the efficient equilibrium prevails also for a large set of parameters violating the previously identified condition. Interestingly, the extent to which efficiency obtains decreases gradually as one moves away from the boundary of this condition.

We confirm a conjecture by Everett et al. (2004) regarding the problem of maximizing closeness centralization in two-mode data, where the number of data of each type is fixed. Intuitively, our result states that among all networks obtainable via two-mode data, the largest closeness is achieved by simply locally maximizing the closeness of a node. Mathematically, our study concerns bipartite graphs with fixed size bipartitions, and we show that the extremal configuration is a rooted tree of depth 2, where neighbors of the root have an equal or almost equal number of children.