Homophily and influence

See also Causality, Causal inference and Contagion.

It has been well-known that “similarity breeds connection”[^1], and the phenomenon is called ‘homophily’. One of the biggest issues is “can we distinguish influence from homophily with observational data?” James H and Nicholas A published a series of paper on the spreading of obesity, smoking, etc through a social network. There has been a long debate on these papers.

Articles

• http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/homophily-vs-influence.html
• Is obesity contagious? A Review of the Debate over the “Network Effects” of Obesity by Conrad Lee
• Social contagion? Maybe not… by Michał Bojanowski

References

• Quantifying causal influences
• Feedback effects between similarity and social influence in online communities
  • http://videolectures.net/kdd08_crandall_fessioc/
• Everyone’s an influencer: quantifying influence on twitter
• Differences in the mechanics of information diffusion across topics: idioms, political hashtags, and complex contagion on twitter
• TwitterRank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers
• Measuring user influence in Twitter: The million follower fallacy

Latent homophily

• Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies
  • Controlling for Latent Homophily in Social Networks through Inferring Latent Locations