The Social Amplifier—Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies
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Pentland_The Social.pdf
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Author(s)
Altshuler, Yaniv
Fire, Michael
Shmueli, Erez
Elovici, Yuval
Bruckstein, Alfred
Lazer, David
Pentland, Alex Paul
Date Issued
July 2013
Journal
Journal of Statistical Physics
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Altshuler, Yaniv, Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli, Yuval Elovici, Alfred Bruckstein, Alex Pentland, and David Lazer. “The Social Amplifier—Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies.” J Stat Phys 152, no. 3 (August 2013): 399–418.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This paper develops a methodology to aggregate signals in a network regarding some hidden state of the world. We argue that focusing on edges around hubs will under certain circumstances amplify the faint signals disseminating in a network, allowing for more efficient detection of that hidden state. We apply this method to detecting emergencies in mobile phone data, demonstrating that under a broad range of cases and a constraint in how many edges can be observed at a time, focusing on the egocentric networks around key hubs will be more effective than sampling random edges. We support this conclusion analytically, through simulations, and with analysis of a dataset containing the call log data from a major mobile carrier in a European nation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-013-0759-z
