research-article

The structure of information pathways in a social communication network

Authors:

Gueorgi Kossinets,

Duncan WattsAuthors Info & Claims

KDD '08: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining

Pages 435 - 443

https://doi.org/10.1145/1401890.1401945

Published: 24 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics of communication using on-line data, including e-mail communication among the faculty and staff of a large university over a two-year period. We formulate a temporal notion of "distance" in the underlying social network by measuring the minimum time required for information to spread from one node to another - a concept that draws on the notion of vector-clocks from the study of distributed computing systems. We find that such temporal measures provide structural insights that are not apparent from analyses of the pure social network topology. In particular, we define the network backbone to be the subgraph consisting of edges on which information has the potential to flow the quickest. We find that the backbone is a sparse graph with a concentration of both highly embedded edges and long-range bridges - a finding that sheds new light on the relationship between tie strength and connectivity in social networks.

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Index Terms

The structure of information pathways in a social communication network
1. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Data mining

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

KDD '08: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining

August 2008

1116 pages

ISBN:9781605581934

DOI:10.1145/1401890

General Chair:
Ying Li
Microsoft adCenter Labs
,
Program Chairs:
Bing Liu
University of Illinois at Chicago
,
Sunita Sarawagi
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 24 August 2008

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KDD08: The 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

August 24 - 27, 2008

Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

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KDD '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 118 of 593 submissions, 20%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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