Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook
L. Backstrom, and J. Kleinberg. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work &\#38; Social Computing, page 831--841. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (Oct 24, 2014)
DOI: 10.1145/2531602.2531642
Abstract
A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.
%0 Conference Paper
%1 Backstrom2014Romantic
%A Backstrom, Lars
%A Kleinberg, Jon
%B Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work &\#38; Social Computing
%C New York, NY, USA
%D 2014
%I ACM
%K marriage, social-networks predictive-models facebook
%P 831--841
%R 10.1145/2531602.2531642
%T Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531642
%X A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.
%@ 978-1-4503-2540-0
@inproceedings{Backstrom2014Romantic,
abstract = {{A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.}},
added-at = {2019-06-10T14:53:09.000+0200},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
author = {Backstrom, Lars and Kleinberg, Jon},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2d34b304845abfbe9080f11039720576d/nonancourt},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work \&\#38; Social Computing},
citeulike-article-id = {12737450},
citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2531602.2531642},
citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6753},
citeulike-linkout-2 = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6753},
citeulike-linkout-3 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531642},
day = 24,
doi = {10.1145/2531602.2531642},
eprint = {1310.6753},
interhash = {bb6e5ef1a25ff6d48af5f357d024044f},
intrahash = {d34b304845abfbe9080f11039720576d},
isbn = {978-1-4503-2540-0},
keywords = {marriage, social-networks predictive-models facebook},
location = {Baltimore, Maryland, USA},
month = oct,
pages = {831--841},
posted-at = {2014-11-14 12:51:16},
priority = {2},
publisher = {ACM},
series = {CSCW '14},
timestamp = {2019-08-22T16:18:54.000+0200},
title = {{Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook}},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531642},
year = 2014
}