Browsing by Author "Botha, Leendert W."

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Modeling online social networks using Quasi-clique communities
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2011-12) Botha, Leendert W.; Kroon, R. S. (Steve); Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Science. Dept. of Mathematical Sciences.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: With billions of current internet users interacting through social networks, the need has arisen to analyze the structure of these networks. Many authors have proposed random graph models for social networks in an attempt to understand and reproduce the dynamics that govern social network development. This thesis proposes a random graph model that generates social networks using a community-based approach, in which users’ affiliations to communities are explicitly modeled and then translated into a social network. Our approach explicitly models the tendency of communities to overlap, and also proposes a method for determining the probability of two users being connected based on their levels of commitment to the communities they both belong to. Previous community-based models do not incorporate community overlap, and assume mutual members of any community are automatically connected. We provide a method for fitting our model to real-world social networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reproducing real-world social network characteristics by investigating its fit on two data sets of current online social networks. The results verify that our proposed model is promising: it is the first community-based model that can accurately reproduce a variety of important social network characteristics, namely average separation, clustering, degree distribution, transitivity and network densification, simultaneously.