University of Notre Dame
Browse
- No file added yet -

Application of Statistical Mechanical Methods to the Modeling of Social Networks

Download (13.95 MB)
thesis
posted on 2013-04-18, 00:00 authored by Anthony Robert Strathman
With the recent availability of large-scale social data sets, social networks have become open to quantitative analysis via the methods of statistical physics. We examine the statistical properties of a real large-scale social network, generated from cellular phone call-trace logs. We find this network, like many other social networks to be assortative (r=0.31) and clustered (i.e., strongly transitive, C=0.21). We measure fluctuation scaling to identify the presence of internal structure in the network and find that structural inhomogeneity effectively disappears at the scale of a few hundred nodes, though there is no sharp cutoff. We introduce an agent-based model of social behavior, designed to model the formation and dissolution of social ties. The model is a modified Metropolis algorithm containing agents operating under the basic sociological constraints of reciprocity, communication need and transitivity. The model introduces the concept of a social temperature. We go on to show that this simple model reproduces the global statistical network features (incl. assortativity, connected fraction, mean degree, clustering, and mean shortest path length) of the real network data and undergoes two phase transitions, one being from a 'gas' to a 'liquid' state and the second from a liquid to a glassy state as function of this social temperature.

History

Date Modified

2017-06-05

Defense Date

2013-04-12

Research Director(s)

Zoltan Toroczkai

Committee Members

Dinshaw Balsara Nitesh Chawla Kathie Newman

Degree

  • Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Level

  • Doctoral Dissertation

Language

  • English

Alternate Identifier

etd-04182013-062109

Publisher

University of Notre Dame

Program Name

  • Physics

Usage metrics

    Dissertations

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC