Articles

Measuring and monitoring collective attention during shocking events

There has been growing interest in leveraging Web-based social and communication technologies for better crisis response. How might the Web platforms be used as an observatory to systematically understand the ...

Authors: Xingsheng He and Yu-Ru Lin

Measuring economic activity in China with mobile big data

Emerging trends in the use of smartphones, online mapping applications, and social media, in addition to the geo-located data they generate, provide opportunities to trace users’ socio-economic activities in a...

Authors: Lei Dong, Sicong Chen, Yunsheng Cheng, Zhengwei Wu, Chao Li and Haishan Wu

Sentiment analysis methods for understanding large-scale texts: a case for using continuum-scored words and word shift graphs

The emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, an extraordinary capacity which has profound implications for our understanding o...

Authors: Andrew J Reagan, Christopher M Danforth, Brian Tivnan, Jake Ryland Williams and Peter Sheridan Dodds

Are you getting sick? Predicting influenza-like symptoms using human mobility behaviors

Understanding and modeling the mobility of individuals is of paramount importance for public health. In particular, mobility characterization is key to predict the spatial and temporal diffusion of human-trans...

Authors: Gianni Barlacchi, Christos Perentis, Abhinav Mehrotra, Mirco Musolesi and Bruno Lepri

Novel and topical business news and their impact on stock market activity

We propose an indicator to measure the degree to which a particular news article is novel, as well as an indicator to measure the degree to which a particular news item attracts attention from investors. The n...

Authors: Takayuki Mizuno, Takaaki Ohnishi and Tsutomu Watanabe

Gaining historical and international relations insights from social media: spatio-temporal real-world news analysis using Twitter

The immense growth of the social Web, which has made a large amount of user data easily and publicly available, has opened a whole new spectrum for research in social behavioral sciences. However, as the volum...

Authors: Vanessa Peña-Araya, Mauricio Quezada, Barbara Poblete and Denis Parra

Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data

The emergence of large stores of transactional data generated by increasing use of digital devices presents a huge opportunity for policymakers to improve their knowledge of the local environment and thus make...

Authors: Graham McNeill, Jonathan Bright and Scott A Hale

The effect of Pokémon Go on the pulse of the city: a natural experiment

Pokémon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of peopl...

Authors: Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Leo Ferres, Diego Caro and Loreto Bravo

Data-driven modeling of collaboration networks: a cross-domain analysis

We analyze large-scale data sets about collaborations from two different domains: economics, specifically 22,000 R&D alliances between 14,500 firms, and science, specifically 300,000 co-authorship relations be...

Authors: Mario V Tomasello, Giacomo Vaccario and Frank Schweitzer

Erratum to: Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression

Authors: Andrew G Reece and Christopher M Danforth

Rapid rise and decay in petition signing

Contemporary collective action, much of which involves social media and other Internet-based platforms, leaves a digital imprint which may be harvested to better understand the dynamics of mobilization. Petiti...

Authors: Taha Yasseri, Scott A Hale and Helen Z Margetts

Comparison of traffic reliability index with real traffic data

Existing studies have developed different indices based on various approaches including network connectivity, delay time and flow capacity, estimating the traffic reliability states from different angles. Howe...

Authors: Limiao Zhang, Guanwen Zeng, Shengmin Guo, Daqing Li and Ziyou Gao

The shape of collaborations

The structure of scientific collaborations has been the object of intense study both for its importance for innovation and scientific advancement, and as a model system for social group coordination and format...

Authors: Alice Patania, Giovanni Petri and Francesco Vaccarino

A roadmap for the computation of persistent homology

Persistent homology (PH) is a method used in topological data analysis (TDA) to study qualitative features of data that persist across multiple scales. It is robust to perturbations of in...

Authors: Nina Otter, Mason A Porter, Ulrike Tillmann, Peter Grindrod and Heather A Harrington

Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression

Using Instagram data from 166 individuals, we applied machine learning tools to successfully identify markers of depression. Statistical features were computationally extracted from 43,950 participant Instagra...

Authors: Andrew G Reece and Christopher M Danforth

Classification of Westminster Parliamentary constituencies using e-petition data

In a representative democracy it is important that politicians have knowledge of the desires, aspirations and concerns of their constituents. Opportunities to gauge these opinions are however limited and, in t...

Authors: Stephen Clark, Nik Lomax and Michelle A Morris

Prediction of employment and unemployment rates from Twitter daily rhythms in the US

By modeling macro-economical indicators using digital traces of human activities on mobile or social networks, we can provide important insights to processes previously assessed via paper-based surveys or poll...

Authors: Eszter Bokányi, Zoltán Lábszki and Gábor Vattay

Early detection of promoted campaigns on social media

Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns - some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns cont...

Authors: Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini

An alternative approach to the limits of predictability in human mobility

Next place prediction algorithms are invaluable tools, capable of increasing the efficiency of a wide variety of tasks, ranging from reducing the spreading of diseases to better resource management in areas su...

Authors: Edin Lind Ikanovic and Anders Mollgaard

Inferring social influence in transport mode choice using mobile phone data

A longitudinal mobile phone data that include both location and communication logs is analyzed to infer social influence in terms of ego-network effect in the commute mode choice. The results show that person’...

Authors: Santi Phithakkitnukoon, Titipat Sukhvibul, Merkebe Demissie, Zbigniew Smoreda, Juggapong Natwichai and Carlos Bento

Individual position diversity in dependence socioeconomic networks increases economic output

The availability of big data recorded from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the potential connection between individuals’ network positions ...

Authors: Wen-Jie Xie, Yan-Hong Yang, Ming-Xia Li, Zhi-Qiang Jiang and Wei-Xing Zhou

Uncovering the relationships between military community health and affects expressed in social media

Military populations present a small, unique community whose mental and physical health impacts the security of the nation. Recent literature has explored social media’s ability to enhance disease surveillance...

Authors: Svitlana Volkova, Lauren E Charles, Josh Harrison and Courtney D Corley

Erratum to: Improving official statistics in emerging markets using machine learning and mobile phone data

Authors: Eaman Jahani, Pål Sundsøy, Johannes Bjelland, Linus Bengtsson, Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

Topological analysis of data

Propelled by a fast evolving landscape of techniques and datasets, data science is growing rapidly. Against this background, topological data analysis (TDA) has carved itself a niche for the analysis of datase...

Authors: Alice Patania, Francesco Vaccarino and Giovanni Petri

Contact activity and dynamics of the social core

Humans interact through numerous communication channels to build and maintain social connections: they meet face-to-face, make phone calls or send text messages, and interact via social media. Although it is k...

Authors: Enys Mones, Arkadiusz Stopczynski and Sune Lehmann

Gender matters! Analyzing global cultural gender preferences for venues using social sensing

Gender differences is a phenomenon around the world actively researched by social scientists. Traditionally, the data used to support such studies is manually obtained, often through surveys with volunteers. H...

Authors: Willi Mueller, Thiago H Silva, Jussara M Almeida and Antonio AF Loureiro

The happiness paradox: your friends are happier than you

Most individuals in social networks experience a so-called Friendship Paradox: they are less popular than their friends on average. This effect may explain recent findings that widespread social network media ...

Authors: Johan Bollen, Bruno Gonçalves, Ingrid van de Leemput and Guangchen Ruan

Improving official statistics in emerging markets using machine learning and mobile phone data

Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies in the developing world with global penetration rates reaching 90%. Mobile phone data, also called CDR, are generated everytime phones are used and rec...

Authors: Eaman Jahani, Pål Sundsøy, Johannes Bjelland, Linus Bengtsson, Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

BiFold visualization of bipartite datasets

The emerging domain of data-enabled science necessitates development of algorithms and tools for knowledge discovery. Human interaction with data through well-constructed graphical representation can take spec...

Authors: Yazhen Jiang, Joseph D Skufca and Jie Sun

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: social compensation when failure to interact risks weakening a relationship

Social networks require active relationship maintenance if they are to be kept at a constant level of emotional closeness. For primates, including humans, failure to interact leads inexorably to a decline in r...

Authors: Kunal Bhattacharya, Asim Ghosh, Daniel Monsivais, Robin Dunbar and Kimmo Kaski

Applying Hidden Markov Models to Voting Advice Applications

In recent times, a phenomenon that threatens the representative democracy of many developed countries is the low voter turnout. Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are used to inform citizens about the political...

Authors: Marilena Agathokleous and Nicolas Tsapatsoulis

Generic temporal features of performance rankings in sports and games

Many complex phenomena, from trait selection in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of t...

Authors: José A Morales, Sergio Sánchez, Jorge Flores, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, Germinal Cocho, Jerónimo Zizumbo, Rosalío F Rodríguez and Gerardo Iñiguez

Estimating suicide occurrence statistics using Google Trends

Data on the number of people who have committed suicide tends to be reported with a substantial time lag of around two years. We examine whether online activity measured by Google searches can help us improve est...

Authors: Ladislav Kristoufek, Helen Susannah Moat and Tobias Preis

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate reli...

Authors: Andrew J Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds

Predicting human mobility through the assimilation of social media traces into mobility models

Predicting human mobility flows at different spatial scales is challenged by the heterogeneity of individual trajectories and the multi-scale nature of transportation networks. As vast amounts of digital trace...

Authors: Mariano G Beiró, André Panisson, Michele Tizzoni and Ciro Cattuto

Convergence of economic growth and the Great Recession as seen from a Celestial Observatory

Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsized influence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, due to a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many s...

Authors: Eamon Duede and Victor Zhorin

Quantifying decision making for data science: from data acquisition to modeling

Organizations, irrespective of their size and type, are increasingly becoming data-driven or aspire to become data-driven. There is a rush to quantify value of their own internal data or the value of integrati...

Authors: Saurabh Nagrecha and Nitesh V Chawla

Ground truth? Concept-based communities versus the external classification of physics manuscripts

Community detection techniques are widely used to infer hidden structures within interconnected systems. Despite demonstrating high accuracy on benchmarks, they reproduce the external classification for many r...

Authors: Vasyl Palchykov, Valerio Gemmetto, Alexey Boyarsky and Diego Garlaschelli

The classical origin of modern mathematics

This paper introduces a data-driven methodology to study the historical evolution of mathematical thinking and its spatial spreading. To do so, we have collected and integrated data from different online acade...

Authors: Floriana Gargiulo, Auguste Caen, Renaud Lambiotte and Timoteo Carletti

Countrywide arrhythmia: emergency event detection using mobile phone data

Large scale social events that involve violence may have dramatic political, economic and social consequences. These events may result in higher crime rates, spreading of infectious diseases, economic crises, ...

Authors: Didem Gundogdu, Ozlem D Incel, Albert A Salah and Bruno Lepri

A multilayer approach to multiplexity and link prediction in online geo-social networks

Online social systems are multiplex in nature as multiple links may exist between the same two users across different social media. In this work, we study the geo-social properties of multiplex links, spanning...

Authors: Desislava Hristova, Anastasios Noulas, Chloë Brown, Mirco Musolesi and Cecilia Mascolo

SentiBench - a benchmark comparison of state-of-the-practice sentiment analysis methods

In the last few years thousands of scientific papers have investigated sentiment analysis, several startups that measure opinions on real data have emerged and a number of innovative products related to this t...

Authors: Filipe N Ribeiro, Matheus Araújo, Pollyanna Gonçalves, Marcos André Gonçalves and Fabrício Benevenuto

Wikipedia traffic data and electoral prediction: towards theoretically informed models

This aim of this article is to explore the potential use of Wikipedia page view data for predicting electoral results. Responding to previous critiques of work using socially generated data to predict election...

Authors: Taha Yasseri and Jonathan Bright

Quantifying social contacts in a household setting of rural Kenya using wearable proximity sensors

Close proximity interactions between individuals influence how infections spread. Quantifying close contacts in developing world settings, where such data is sparse yet disease burden is high, can provide insi...

Authors: Moses C Kiti, Michele Tizzoni, Timothy M Kinyanjui, Dorothy C Koech, Patrick K Munywoki, Milosch Meriac, Luca Cappa, André Panisson, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto and D James Nokes

Bandit strategies in social search: the case of the DARPA red balloon challenge

Collective search for people and information has tremendously benefited from emerging communication technologies that leverage the wisdom of the crowds, and has been increasingly influential in solving time-cr...

Authors: Haohui Chen, Iyad Rahwan and Manuel Cebrian

Gender homophily in online dyadic and triadic relationships

Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such pheno...

Authors: David Laniado, Yana Volkovich, Karolin Kappler and Andreas Kaltenbrunner

Open source data reveals connection between online and on-street protest activity

There is enormous interest in inferring features of human behavior in the real world from potential digital footprints created online - particularly at the collective level, where the sheer volume of online ac...

Authors: Hong Qi, Pedro Manrique, Daniela Johnson, Elvira Restrepo and Neil F Johnson

Untangling performance from success

Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to dist...

Authors: Burcu Yucesoy and Albert-László Barabási

Erratum to: Touristic site attractiveness seen through Twitter

Authors: Aleix Bassolas, Maxime Lenormand, Antònia Tugores, Bruno Gonçalves and José J Ramasco

Erratum to: Linguistic neighbourhoods: explaining cultural borders on Wikipedia through multilingual co-editing activity

Authors: Anna Samoilenko, Fariba Karimi, Daniel Edler, Jérôme Kunegis and Markus Strohmaier