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Data Science of the Facebook World

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#61

Post by stared »

taliesinb wrote: post #41
stared wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to "questions I would ask [the data]": which interests are likely shared by friends? (Can you make a correlation table, or a graph out of it?) And - is correlations of one's interest vs friends interests the same as correlation of one's interests with itself.

That's a good idea! Though if I remember correctly, interests aren't canonicalized, so it might be pretty messy. And I'm not sure if people fill them in non-ironically any more.

Well, it is always "people how clicked on FB that they like X", regardless whether it is shallow or deep interest, genuine or ironic, or random, or "because my friends like it and I want to be as cool as them" etc.

If more fine grained, I wouldn't be surprised to see ties between seemingly exclusive things... e.g. in this http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se... (not interesting, but participation in particular Q&A sites) "christianity", "judaism" and "islam" are in the same category (as opposed to people apathetic to that topic).

Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#62

Post by photorized »

taliesinb wrote: post #54
photorized wrote: post #51

One thing that bugs me is how comments are linked to "interest". There are many topics that interest people (passive consumption), that do not necessarily translate into engaging in a conversation with others publicly. As a marketing term - sure, that would be a good indicator of interest. Since this article is more scientific than marketing-oriented, I would clarify what some of the metrics mean (or don't mean). Exc…

You're right. A more ambitious thing might get a bit closer to people's "real interests" would be to follow posted links and topic model the contents of those links.

I am very interested in that angle - let's connect when you have time, twitter @iTrendTV

Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#64

Post by austinl »

taliesinb wrote: post #47
austinl wrote: post #45

I've been doing Facebook network visualization for a while now with Gephi. Here are some of the graphs I came up with: http://visualizingpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/facebook...

Nice! Do you know if Gephi can do something similar to the summarization that we did using cluster diagrams? The whole "ball of hair" problem doesn't have any other real solution, I don't think (well, unless you use edge clustering, but that doesn't help in-group connections).

I'm 90% certain that it can, but I haven't worked with it in a while. I remember a setting in the display options that simply combined all the dots of one color into one large group.

Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#66

Post by taliesinb »

austinl wrote: post #64
taliesinb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Do you know if Gephi can do something similar to the summarization that we did using cluster diagrams? The whole "ball of hair" problem doesn't have any other real solution, I don't think (well, unless you use edge clustering, but that doesn't help in-group connections).

I'm 90% certain that it can, but I haven't worked with it in a while. I remember a setting in the display options that simply combined all the dots of one color into one large group.

Cool! I wonder how one could combine the best of both worlds... what we're really talking about here is a hierarchy of graph plots in which you can drill down to each node = graph at a lower level.

Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#67

Post by sskates »

Wow- this is awesome! It's really cool how people's friend distribution by age is a convolution of their age and the age of the general facebook population. It's also scary in a way to see a snapshot of how I'm likely to change in the future with regards to my clusters of friends, my relationship status, and what I'll talk about.

Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#68

Post by xk_id »

The traditional way to plot the assortativity by age is using a scatter plot / heatmap. This is similar to what they did for country homophily on p12 of the Facebook anatomy paper. The result would be a plot with a prominent diagonal, illustrating that "same attracts same".

That aside, imo, Facebook is an incredibly idiosyncratic "app", which makes almost no sense. And yet, it gave us so many opportunities for interesting discussions, like the insights in this blog post. Nice job.

Re: Data Science of the Facebook World

#70

Post by Create »

rdouble wrote: post #12
carlob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Rutherford says: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" and then wins the Nobel prize for… You got that right: chemistry!

Chemistry is applied physics, after all.

"Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been ." Theodore von Kármán
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