Homophily and Influence in Social Networks

07 Oct 2024 11:06

See this post for an explanation of what this means, and the last section of my paper with Andrew Thomas (link below) for the technical/methodological questions which most interest me in this area.

I am, of course, convinced that social influence happens. (I'm convinced I've been influenced.) I am also convinced that most social-scientific studies of such questions provide us with no information whatsoever. (In a more charitable mood, I might allow that they are "suggestive".) This is not a comfortable straddle.

Query: to what extent do the same problems show up when looking at other sorts of networks, say of neurons, or of gene regulatory elements?

Somewhat arbitrarily, I have put references on defining causal effects and counter-factuals under experiments on social networks.

Elizabeth L. Ogburn, "Challenges to estimating contagion effects from observational data", arxiv:1706.08440

Aris Anagnostopoulos, Ravi Kumar and Mohammad Mahdian, "Influence and Correlation in Social Networks", in KDD 2008 [Thanks to Dr. Madian for a preprint]
Sinan Aral, Lev Muchnik and Arun Sundararajan, "Distinguishing influence-based contagion from homophily-driven diffusion in dynamic networks", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 106 (2009): 21544--21549
Sumit Basu, Tanzeem Choudhury, Brian Clarkson and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, "Learning Human Interactions with the Influence Model", Media Lab Vision and Modeling Technical Report 539 (June 2001) [This is an interesting but rather special model for social influence: basically, one fits a model of pairwise influence for each dyad, and then predicts the behavior of a given individual by taking a weighted sum of the predictions of those models. So one needs to learn the pairwise model parameters and the prediction weights. Not at all obvious how to do specification testing in this framework... Thanks to Gustavo Lacerda and Kevin Murphy for the pointer]
Jake Bowers, Mark Frederickson, Costas Panagopoulos, "Reasoning about Interference Between Units: A General Framework", arxiv:1208.0366
Damon Centola, "An Experimental Study of Homophily in the Adoption of Health Behavior", Science 334 (2011): 1269--1272
Stephen Judd, Michael Kearns, and Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, "Behavioral dynamics and influence in networked coloring and consensus", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 14978--14982 [Comments under collective cognition]
Timothy La Fond and Jennifer Neville, "Randomization Tests for Distinguishing Social Influence and Homophily Effects", WWW 2010 [PDF reprint via Prof. Neville]
Roger Th. A. J. Leenders
- Structure and Influence: Statistical Models for the Dynamics of Actor Attributes, Network Structure and Their Interdependence [mini-review]
- "Modeling social influence through network autocorrelation: constructing the weight matrix", Social Networks 24 (2002): 21--47 [Basically, part of chapter 3 of his Structure and Influence --- mostly section 3.3. PDF preprint]
Russell Lyons, "The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis", Statistics, Politics, and Policy 2 (2011): 1, arxiv:1007.2876
Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Loving and James M. Cook, "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks", Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415--444
Hans Noel and Brendan Nyhan, "The ``Unfriending'' Problem: The Consequences of Homophily in Friendship Retention for Causal Estimates of Social Influence", Social Networks forthcoming (2011), arxiv:1009.3243
Betsy Sinclair, The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior
Tom A. B. Snijders, Johan Koskinen, and Michael Schweinberger, "Maximum likelihood estimation for social network dynamics", Annals of Applied Statistics 4 (2010): 567--588, arxiv:1011.1753
Christian Steglich, Tom A. B. Snijders and Michael Pearson, "Dynamic Networks and Behavior: Separating Selection from Influence", Sociological Methodology 40 (2010): 329--392 [Preprint]
Tyler J. VanderWeele, "Sensitivity Analysis for Contagion Effects in Social Networks", Sociological Methods and Research 17 (2011): 240--255
Tyler J. VanderWeele, Elizabeth L. Ogburn and Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen, "Why and When 'Flawed' Social Network Analyses Still Yield Valid Tests of no Contagion", Statistics, Politics, and Policy 3 (2012) [and my comment]
Greg Ver Steeg and Aram Galstyan
- "Ruling out latent homophily in social networks", NIPS 2010 workshop on social computing [PDF]
- "Statistical Tests for Contagion in Observational Social Network Studies", AISTATS 2013, arxiv:1211.4889

Edward McFowland III and CRS, "Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations", Journal of the American Statistical Association forthcoming (2021), arxiv:1607.06565
CRS and Andrew C. Thomas, "Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies", Sociological Methods and Research 40 (2011): 211--239, arxiv:1004.4704

Hannah Worrall, "Community Detection as a Method to Control For Homophily in Social Networks", Senior honors thesis, Statistics Department, Carnegie Mellon University (2014)

Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin, The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become
Andy Baker, Barry Ames and Lucio Renno, Persuasive Peers: Social Communication and Voting in Latin America
Mark E. Feinberg and D. Wayne Osgood (eds.), Teen Friendship Networks, Development, and Risky Behavior
Craig M. Rawlings, Daniel M. McFarland, Linus Dahlander, Dan Wang, "Streams of Thought: How Ties Form and Influence Flows among New Faculty" [PDF preprint]
Brandon Michael Stewart and Yuri M. Zhukov, "Choosing Your Neighbors: Networks of Diffusion in International Relations" [Preprint]

Damon Centola and Michael W. Macy, "Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties", American Journal of Sociology submitted [PDF preprint via Macy]
Yen-Sheng Chiang, "Birds of Moderately Different Feathers: Bandwagon Dynamics and the Threshold Heterogeneity of Network Neighbors", Journal of Mathematical Sociology 31 (2006): 47--69
Gregorio D'Agostino, Antonio Scala, Vinko Zlatic, Guido Caldarelli, "Assortativity Effects on Diffusion-like Processes in Scale-free Networks", arxiv:1105.3574
Noah E. Friedkin, A Structural Theory of Social Influence
Rumi Ghosh, Kristina Lerman, "Predicting Influential Users in Online Social Networks", arxiv:1005.4882
Benjamin Golub, Matthew O. Jackson, "How Homophily Affects Diffusion and Learning in Networks", arxiv:0811.4013
Manuel Gomez-Rodridguez, Jure Leskovec and Andreas Krause, "Inferring Networks of Diffusion and Influence", arxiv:1006.0234
Shawndra Hill, Adrian Benton, Lyle Ungar, Sofus Macskassy, Annie Chung, John H. Holmes, "A Cluster-based Method for Isolating Influence on Twitter" [PDF preprint
Robert Huckfeldt, Paul E. Johnson and John Sprague, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks
Nicholas Lanchier, "Opinion dynamics with confidence threshold: an alternative to the Axelrod model", arxiv:1003.0115
Marc Lelarge, "Diffusion and Cascading Behavior in Random Networks", arxiv:1012.2062
Sune Lehmann and Yong-Yeol Ahn (eds.), Complex Spreading Phenomena in Social Systems [The book's website very nicely contains links to online versions of all the papers, including both the final version (for those with library access) and the arxiv preprints. I've read many of the papers and recommend them, but I have a strict rule about not recommending books unless I've read all of them, so...]
Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez and Jason Kaufman, "Social selection and peer influence in an online social network", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 68--72
Omar Lizardo, "How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks" [PDF preprint]
Elizabeth L. Ogburn, Oleg Sofrygin, Ivan Diaz, Mark J. van der Laan, "Causal inference for social network data", arxiv:1705.08527 [I've heard Prof. Ogburn talk about this work, but I need to study the paper in depth]
Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Felix Reed-Tsochas, "Spontaneous emergence of social influence in online systems", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 18375--18380
Daniel T. Ragan, D. Wayne Osgood, Nayan G. Ramirez, James Moody and Scott D. Gest, "A Comparison of Peer Influence Estimates from SIENA Stochastic Actor–based Models and from Conventional Regression Approaches", Sociological Methods and Research 51 (2022): 357--395
Fergal Reid, Neil Hurley, "Diffusion in Complex Networks With Overlapping Community Structure", arxiv:1105.5849
Jon C. Rogowski and Betsy Sinclair, "Estimating the Causal Effects of Social Interaction with Endogenous Networks", Political Analysis forthcoming (2012)
Christian Steglich, Philip Sinclair, Jo Holliday and Laurence Moore, "Actor-based analysis of peer influence in A Stop Smoking In Schools Trial (ASSIST)", Social Networks forthcoming (2010)
Christophe Van den Bulte and Gary L. Lilien, "Medical Innovation Revisited: Social Contagion versus Marketing Effort", American Journal of Sociology 106 (2001): 1409--1435
H. Peyton Young, "The diffusion of innovations in social networks", in L. E. Blume and S. N. Durlauf (eds.), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System III (2003)