When we register accounts in some online
communities, the online community system will automatically recommend some
people to be our friends. It is highly possible that these people recommended
by the system are our friends or acquaintance in reality. It is amazing that the
system seems to be familiar with us. After taking Prof. Rosanna’s last-week
class, we may find some reasonable explanations.
As a matter of fact, these so-called “online
community assistants” are nothing but some intelligent computers that are good
at analyzing social network. After acquiring some personal information from us (e.g.
Names, Gender, Hobbies, Your School, Your University or something else), it’s
easy for computers to help us broaden our social network.
When I was an undergraduate, I heard an
empirical theory, which says, “Any two people in the world can be connected by
establishing no more than six relationships.” It seems to be incredible but it
is sincerely reasonable. In order to simplify the model of people’s
relationship networks, we may adopt the Graph Theory.
In a prodigiously large social network,
each individual can be symbolized as a vertex (node). Relationships between
persons (friends, followers etc.) can be regarded as edges (lines). Numbers of edges
connected to the vertex are defined as graphs’ degree. Obviously, the more degree
a vertex has, the more important role this vertex is playing in this graph. Graph
theory plays an important role in social network analysis, except from degree,
there are some other concepts to evaluate vertices’ attributes, such as closeness
and centrality. The graph theory also has copious branch disciplines, there is
no denying that making further research in this realm should be full of fun.
After all, graph theory is one of tools used
in analyzing networks. Just like natural language processing, text
classification methods. If we combine these useful tools wisely, there is no
doubt that we may get more information from people’s relationships.
A good summary to describe what Social Network is. Thank you for your sharing!
回复删除Thanks, actually, there exist lots of interesting knowledge in our daily lives. I feel excited about digging them out.
删除Yeah, I think so. The social media product just provide a good support for us to share the worthy information with each other.
删除Making new friends, sharing new ideas. This makes lives more easy. ;-)
删除Thank you for your summary which helps me to understand more about the social network.
回复删除That's cool man, I feel excited about sharing my understanding with your guys.
删除It's true that the graph theory make lots of help to the social network analytics. In order to find the valuable information behind the data, we have to combine several theories and methods. Thanks for sharing.
回复删除Graph theory makes complex relationships visible. It is a good tool for analyzing.
删除Something like nodex may be helpful with analysing the graph I think.Thanks for sharing!
回复删除I've learned Graph Theory in undergraduate and it is really a good tool used in analyzing networks. By the way, i'm interested in one sentence you said---Any two people in the world can be connected by establishing no more than six relationships. This is the reason why we can extend our social network unexpectedly. Thanks for your sharing with this particular angle of graph theory. An amazing blog.
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