Higher-Order Interactions in Social Systems
Name
sarker-arnabs-phd-idss-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
5.86 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1027cf92a7856dfa03aedd6e37602c39
Author(s)
Sarker, Arnab Kumar
Advisor(s)
Jadbabaie, Ali
Date Issued
February 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The de facto representation of a social network is a graph— individuals are represented as nodes, and relationships between pairs of individuals are represented as edges. This results in a powerful abstraction by which social relationships can be systematically studied to understand emergent population-scale behavior. However, many social interactions occur in groups: three individuals may co-author a paper, a team of employees may collaborate on a task, a single tweet may mention four users. Breaking such interactions into a collection of pairwise relationships can oversimplify the rich social contexts in which these individuals know one another. This thesis explores a different paradigm of social network analysis, namely, using "higher-order" network models such as hypergraphs and simplicial complexes which can explicitly encode co-present contexts between three or more individuals. The first two projects describe how higher-order interactions can differ from pairwise interactions in terms of micro-level content and macro-level structure, respectively. The latter two projects then develop an applied mathematical toolkit for the algebraic topological analysis of higher-order interactions in social networks.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
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