Trade, Conflict and Sentiments: Multi-relational Organization of Large-scale Social Networks

 

RENAUD LAMBIOTTE

IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

 

The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore social systems. Such systems can often be described in terms of large, complex networks that have a topology of interconnected nodes. Much emphasis has been put on the existence or absence of interactions between actors, as well as their possible strength or directionality, but the nature of these interactions has been overlooked in most empirical studies, mainly because it is usually unavailable in large-scale data. In this work, we perform an analysis of a large-scale social network where different types of one-to-one interactions can be identified: friendship, enmity, communication, trade, bounty and war. As a first step, we analyze these different types of networks when considered as separate entities, but also go one step further by exploring how the inter-dependence of these networks determines the organization of the social system. In particular, we study the overlap between the different types of links and examine the tendency of actors to play different roles in different networks. Finally, we focus on a particular type of multiplex network where only friendship and enmity relations are considered and perform a large-scale verification of structural balance theory.