KDD 2017 Research Paper KDD’17, August 13–17, 2017, Halifax, NS, Canada Structural Diversity and Homophily: A Study Across More Than One Hundred Big Networks Yuxiao Dong∗ Reid A. Johnson Microso Research University of Notre Dame Redmond, WA 98052 Notre Dame, IN 46556
[email protected] [email protected] Jian Xu Nitesh V. Chawla University of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 Notre Dame, IN 46556
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference format: A widely recognized organizing principle of networks is structural Yuxiao Dong, Reid A. Johnson, Jian Xu, and Nitesh V. Chawla. 2017. Struc- tural Diversity and Homophily: A Study Across More an One Hundred homophily, which suggests that people with more common neigh- Big Networks. In Proceedings of KDD ’17, August 13–17, 2017, Halifax, NS, bors are more likely to connect with each other. However, what in- Canada., , 10 pages. uence the diverse structures embedded in common neighbors (e.g., DOI: hp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3097983.3098116 and ) have on link formation is much less well-understood. To explore this problem, we begin by characterizing the structural diversity of common neighborhoods. Using a collection of 120 large- 1 INTRODUCTION scale networks, we demonstrate that the impact of the common neighborhood diversity on link existence can vary substantially Since the time of Aristotle, it has been observed that people “love across networks. We nd that its positive eect on Facebook and those who are like themselves” [2]. We now know this as the negative eect on LinkedIn suggest dierent underlying network- principle of homophily, which asserts that people’s propensity to ing needs in these networks.