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Synthetic generators for simulating social networks

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Date Issued:
2014
Abstract/Description:
An application area of increasing importance is creating agent-based simulations to model human societies. One component of developing these simulations is the ability to generate realistic human social networks. Online social networking websites, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, have increased in popularity in the last decade. Despite the increase in online social networking tools and the importance of studying human behavior in these networks, collecting data directly from these networks is not always feasible due to privacy concerns. Previous work in this area has primarily been limited to 1) network generators that aim to duplicate a small subset of the original network's properties and 2) problem-specific generators for applications such as the evaluation of community detection algorithms.In this thesis, we extended two synthetic network generators to enable them to duplicate the properties of a specific dataset. In the first generator, we consider feature similarity and label homophily among individuals when forming links. The second generator is designed to handle multiplex networks that contain different link types. We evaluate the performance of both generators on existing real-world social network datasets, as well as comparing our methods with a related synthetic network generator. In this thesis, we demonstrate that the proposed synthetic network generators are both time efficient and require only limited parameter optimization.
Title: Synthetic generators for simulating social networks.
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Name(s): Mohammed Ali, Awrad, Author
Sukthankar, Gita, Committee Chair
Wu, Annie, Committee Member
Boloni, Ladislau, Committee Member
University of Central Florida, Degree Grantor
Type of Resource: text
Date Issued: 2014
Publisher: University of Central Florida
Language(s): English
Abstract/Description: An application area of increasing importance is creating agent-based simulations to model human societies. One component of developing these simulations is the ability to generate realistic human social networks. Online social networking websites, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, have increased in popularity in the last decade. Despite the increase in online social networking tools and the importance of studying human behavior in these networks, collecting data directly from these networks is not always feasible due to privacy concerns. Previous work in this area has primarily been limited to 1) network generators that aim to duplicate a small subset of the original network's properties and 2) problem-specific generators for applications such as the evaluation of community detection algorithms.In this thesis, we extended two synthetic network generators to enable them to duplicate the properties of a specific dataset. In the first generator, we consider feature similarity and label homophily among individuals when forming links. The second generator is designed to handle multiplex networks that contain different link types. We evaluate the performance of both generators on existing real-world social network datasets, as well as comparing our methods with a related synthetic network generator. In this thesis, we demonstrate that the proposed synthetic network generators are both time efficient and require only limited parameter optimization.
Identifier: CFE0005532 (IID), ucf:50300 (fedora)
Note(s): 2014-12-01
M.S.Cp.E.
Engineering and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Masters
This record was generated from author submitted information.
Subject(s): Synthetic networks -- Attributes based network -- social networks -- multi-link generator -- complex network generator
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005532
Restrictions on Access: public 2014-12-15
Host Institution: UCF

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