%0 Journal Article
%1 doerfel2018clones
%A Doerfel, Stephan
%A Hanika, Tom
%A Stumme, Gerd
%D 2018
%J CoRR
%K clones fca myown networks preprint sna social
%T Clones in Social Networks
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07849
%V abs/1802.07849
%X It is well known that any bipartite (social) network can be regarded as a
formal context $(G,M,I)$. Therefore, such networks give raise to formal concept
lattices which can be investigated utilizing the toolset of Formal Concept
Analysis (FCA). In particular, the notion of clones in closure systems on $M$,
i.e., pairwise interchangeable attributes that leave the closure system
unchanged, suggests itself naturally as a candidate to be analyzed in the realm
of FCA based social network analysis. In this study, we investigate the notion
of clones in social networks. After building up some theoretical background for
the clone relation in formal contexts we try to find clones in real word data
sets. To this end, we provide an experimental evaluation on nine mostly well
known social networks and provide some first insights on the impact of clones.
We conclude our work by nourishing the understanding of clones by generalizing
those to permutations of higher order.