Analysis and applications of social network formation.

详细信息   

• 作者：Hu ; Daning.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2009
• 导师：Zhao, J. Leon,eadvisorNunamaker, Jay F.ecommittee memberZhang, Zhuecommittee member
• 毕业院校：University of Arizona
• Department：Management Information Systems
• ISBN：9781109283808
• CBH：3366696
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：1767532
• Pages：202

文摘

Nowadays people and organizations are more and more interconnected in the forms of social networks: the nodes are social entities and the links are various relationships among them. Social network theory and methods of social network analysis SNA) are being increasingly used to study such real-world networks in order to support knowledge management and decision making in organizations. However, most existing social network studies focus on the static topologies of networks. The dynamic network link formation process is largely ignored. This dissertation is devoted to studying such dynamic network formation processes to support knowledge management and decision making in networked environments. Three challenges remain to be addressed in modeling and analyzing the dynamic network link formation processes. The first challenge is about modeling the network topological changes using longitudinal network data. The second challenge is concerned with examining factors that influence formation of links among individuals in networks. The third challenge regards link prediction in evolving social networks. This dissertation presents four essays that address these challenges in various knowledge management domains. The first essay studies the topological changes of a major international terrorist network over a 14-year period. In addition, this paper used a simulation approach to examine this networks vulnerability to random failures, targeted attacks, and real-world authorities counterattacks. The second essay and third essay focus on examining determinants that significantly influence the link formation processes in social networks. The second essay found that mutual acquaintances and vehicle affiliations facilitate future co-offending link formation in a real-world criminal network. The third essay found that homophily in programming language preference and mutual acquaintances are determinants for forming participation links in an online Open Source social network. The fourth essay focuses on link prediction in evolving social networks. It proposes a novel infrastructure for describing and utilizing the discovered determinants of link formation processes i.e., semantics of social networks) in link prediction to support expert recommendation application in an Open Source developer community. It is found that the integrated mechanism outperforms both user-based and Top-N most recognized mechanisms.