Community and hierarchy in social networks
Visiting speaker
Max Jerdee
PhD student, University of Michigan
Past Talk
Hybrid
Friday
Jan 10, 2025
Watch video
2:00 pm
EST
Virtual
177 Huntington Ave.
11th floor
11th floor
Devon House
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
Data sets of interactions, such as human and animal social networks, exhibit informative patterns in their structure. Communities appear as individuals cluster into tightly knit social groups, often along the lines of shared attributes. Hierarchies emerge as interactions tend to orient in a consistent direction, for example as people name higher status peers more often as their friends. Probabilistic models are used to leverage these tendencies to infer these underlying structures from the network alone. In this work we define a Bayesian model that jointly models these processes and further explores the possible interplay between them. This framework allows us to quantify the degree of both community structure and hierarchy present in a system and further to quantify the strength of interaction between the two. To what extent does community membership influence social status? And vice versa? By fitting the resulting model we obtain rich descriptions of a variety of data sets and consistently find strong evidence of interactions between community structure and hierarchy.
About the speaker
About the speaker
Max Jerdee is a 5th year Physics PhD student at the University of Michigan, working in Mark Newman’s research group. He graduated with a BA in Physics from Princeton in 2020, and his research interests since have wandered from astrophysics to high energy theory, but he now mostly works on using physical ideas to explore information theory and rankings on networks.
Max Jerdee is a 5th year Physics PhD student at the University of Michigan, working in Mark Newman’s research group. He graduated with a BA in Physics from Princeton in 2020, and his research interests since have wandered from astrophysics to high energy theory, but he now mostly works on using physical ideas to explore information theory and rankings on networks.
Want to be notified about upcoming NetSI events? Sign up for our email list below!
Thank you! You have been added to our email list.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form