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Chapter 21 - Networks demand network thinking: the friendship paradox

from Part III - Fundamentals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2024

James Bagrow
Affiliation:
University of Vermont
Yong‐Yeol Ahn
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Summary

In this chapter, we begin our dive into the fundamentals of network data. We delve deep into the strange world of networks by considering the friendship paradox, the apparently contradictory finding that most people (nodes) have friends (neighbors) who are more popular than themselves. How can this be? Where are all these friends coming from? We introduce network thinking to resolve this paradox. As we will see, It is due to constraints induced by the network structure: pick a node randomly and you are much more likely to land next to a high-degree node than on a high-degree node because high-degree nodes have many neighbors. This is unexpected, almost profoundly so; a local (node-level) view of a network will not accurately reflect the global network structure. This paradox highlights the care we need to take when thinking about networks and network data mathematically and practically.

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Chapter
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Working with Network Data
A Data Science Perspective
, pp. 317 - 326
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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