Is Web Content a Good Proxy for Real-Life Interaction?

Mark Kibanov (1) , Martin Atzmueller (1) , Christoph Scholz (1) , Alain Barrat (2, 3, 4) , Ciro Cattuto (4) , Gerd Stumme (1)

1 Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
2 CPT - E5 Physique statistique et systèmes complexes
3 CPT - Centre de Physique Théorique - UMR 7332
4 ISI - Data Science Laboratory

—Today, many people spend a lot of time online. Their social interactions captured in online social networks are an important part of the overall personal social profile, in addition to interactions taking place offline. This paper investigates whether relations captured by online social networks can be used as a proxy for the relations in offline social networks, such as networks of human face-to-face (F2F) proximity and coauthorship networks. Particularly, the paper focuses on interactions of computer scientists in online settings (homepages, social networks profiles and connections) and offline settings (scientific collaboration, face-to-face communications during the conferences). We focus on quantitative studies and investigate the structural similarities and correlations of the induced networks; in addition, we analyze implications between networks. Finally, we provide a qualitative user analysis to find characteristics of good and bad proxies.

Domaines: Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]; Web

Mark Kibanov, Martin Atzmueller, Christoph Scholz, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, et al.. Is Web Content a Good Proxy for Real-Life Interaction?. International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Aug 2015, Paris, France. ⟨hal-01212360⟩