Articles

Analysing global professional gender gaps using LinkedIn advertising data

Although women’s participation in tertiary education and the labour force has expanded over the past decades, women continue to be underrepresented in technical and managerial occupations. We analyse if gender...

Authors: Ridhi Kashyap and Florianne C. J. Verkroost

Correction to: Flow of online misinformation during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

Authors: Guido Caldarelli, Rocco De Nicola, Marinella Petrocchi, Manuel Pratelli and Fabio Saracco

The impact of digital contact tracing on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic—a comprehensive modelling study

Contact tracing is one of several strategies employed in many countries to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Digital contact tracing (DCT) uses tools such as cell-phone applications to improve tracing speed and r...

Authors: Tina R. Pollmann, Stefan Schönert, Johannes Müller, Julia Pollmann, Elisa Resconi, Christoph Wiesinger, Christian Haack, Lolian Shtembari, Andrea Turcati, Birgit Neumair, Stephan Meighen-Berger, Giovanni Zattera, Matthias Neumair, Uljana Apel and Augustine Okolie

Uncovering the fragility of large-scale engineering projects

Engineering projects are notoriously hard to complete on-time, with project delays often theorised to propagate across interdependent activities. Here, we use a novel dataset consisting of activity networks fr...

Authors: Marc Santolini, Christos Ellinas and Christos Nicolaides

State-space models reveal bursty movement behaviour of dance event visitors

Pedestrian movements during large crowded events naturally consist of different modes of movement behaviour. Despite its importance for understanding crowd dynamics, intermittent movement behaviour is an aspec...

Authors: Philip Rutten, Michael H. Lees, Sander Klous and Peter M. A. Sloot

Flow of online misinformation during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online ve...

Authors: Guido Caldarelli, Rocco De Nicola, Marinella Petrocchi, Manuel Pratelli and Fabio Saracco

Multilayer networks for text analysis with multiple data types

We are interested in the widespread problem of clustering documents and finding topics in large collections of written documents in the presence of metadata and hyperlinks. To tackle the challenge of accountin...

Authors: Charles C. Hyland, Yuanming Tao, Lamiae Azizi, Martin Gerlach, Tiago P. Peixoto and Eduardo G. Altmann

Linking Twitter and survey data: asymmetry in quantity and its impact

Linked social media and survey data have the potential to be a unique source of information for social research. While the potential usefulness of this methodology is widely acknowledged, very few studies have...

Authors: Tarek Al Baghal, Alexander Wenz, Luke Sloan and Curtis Jessop

Evolution of the political opinion landscape during electoral periods

We present a study of the evolution of the political landscape during the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections in Argentina, based on data obtained from the micro-blogging platform Twitter. We build a semantic...

Authors: Tomás Mussi Reyero, Mariano G. Beiró, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Laura Hernández and Dimitris Kotzinos

Competition-driven modeling of temporal networks

We study the problem of modeling temporal networks constrained by the size of a concurrent set, a characteristic of temporal networks shown to be important in many application areas, e.g., in transportation, s...

Authors: Kaijie Zhu, George Fletcher and Nikolay Yakovets

Evaluation of home detection algorithms on mobile phone data using individual-level ground truth

Inferring mobile phone users’ home location, i.e., assigning a location in space to a user based on data generated by the mobile phone network, is a central task in leveraging mobile phone data to study social...

Authors: Luca Pappalardo, Leo Ferres, Manuel Sacasa, Ciro Cattuto and Loreto Bravo

Urban green space and happiness in developed countries

Urban green space is thought to contribute to citizen happiness by promoting physical and mental health. Nevertheless, how urban green space and happiness are related across many countries with different socio...

Authors: Oh-Hyun Kwon, Inho Hong, Jeasurk Yang, Donghee Y. Wohn, Woo-Sung Jung and Meeyoung Cha

Evolution of urban forms observed from space

Multiple driving forces shape cities. These forces include the costs of transporting goods and people, the types of predominant local industries, and the policies that govern urban planning. Here, we examine h...

Authors: Haohui Chen, Yury Kryvasheyeu, Weipan Xu, Yaofu Huang, Jiayi Deng, Siru Ren, Xun Li, Iyad Rahwan and Manuel Cebrian

Complex decision-making strategies in a stock market experiment explained as the combination of few simple strategies

Many studies have shown that there are regularities in the way human beings make decisions. However, our ability to obtain models that capture such regularities and can accurately predict unobserved decisions ...

Authors: Gaël Poux-Médard, Sergio Cobo-Lopez, Jordi Duch, Roger Guimerà and Marta Sales-Pardo

Prediction of new scientific collaborations through multiplex networks

The establishment of new collaborations among scientists fertilizes the scientific environment, fostering novel discoveries. Understanding the dynamics driving the development of scientific collaborations is t...

Authors: Marta Tuninetti, Alberto Aleta, Daniela Paolotti, Yamir Moreno and Michele Starnini

Inferring psychological traits from spending categories and dynamic consumption patterns

In recent years there has been a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by new technologies. One type of digital footprint that is universal across the world, but that has received relat...

Authors: Natkamon Tovanich, Simone Centellegher, Nacéra Bennacer Seghouani, Joe Gladstone, Sandra Matz and Bruno Lepri

Evaluating structural edge importance in temporal networks

To monitor risk in temporal financial networks, we need to understand how individual behaviours affect the global evolution of networks. Here we define a structural importance metric—which we denote as

Authors: Isobel E. Seabrook, Paolo Barucca and Fabio Caccioli

Predicting partially observed processes on temporal networks by Dynamics-Aware Node Embeddings (DyANE)

Low-dimensional vector representations of network nodes have proven successful to feed graph data to machine learning algorithms and to improve performance across diverse tasks. Most of the embedding technique...

Authors: Koya Sato, Mizuki Oka, Alain Barrat and Ciro Cattuto

Characterizing key agents in the cryptocurrency economy through blockchain transaction analysis

The cryptocurrency economy provides a comprehensive digital trace of human economic behavior: almost all cryptocurrency users’ activities are faithfully recorded in transactions on public blockchains. However,...

Authors: Xiao Fan Liu, Huan-Huan Ren, Si-Hao Liu and Xian-Jian Jiang

An end-to-end statistical process with mobile network data for official statistics

Mobile network data has been proven to provide a rich source of information in multiple statistical domains such as demography, tourism, urban planning, etc. However, the incorporation of this data source to t...

Authors: David Salgado, Luis Sanguiao, Bogdan Oancea, Sandra Barragán and Marian Necula

Money flow network among firms’ accounts in a regional bank of Japan

In this study, we investigate the flow of money among bank accounts possessed by firms in a region by employing an exhaustive list of all the bank transfers in a regional bank in Japan, to clarify how the netw...

Authors: Yoshi Fujiwara, Hiroyasu Inoue, Takayuki Yamaguchi, Hideaki Aoyama, Takuma Tanaka and Kentaro Kikuchi

Behaviours and attitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from a cross-national Facebook survey

In the absence of medical treatment and vaccination, individual behaviours are key to curbing the spread of COVID-19. Here we describe efforts to collect attitudinal and behavioural data and disseminate insigh...

Authors: Daniela Perrotta, André Grow, Francesco Rampazzo, Jorge Cimentada, Emanuele Del Fava, Sofia Gil-Clavel and Emilio Zagheni

On the interplay between educational attainment and nutrition: a spatially-aware perspective

Food choices are an integral part of wellbeing and longevity, yet poor nutrition is responsible for millions of deaths every year. Among the complex mosaic of determinants of food choices are demographic, soci...

Authors: Narges Azizi Fard, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova and Rossano Schifanella

Internal migration and mobile communication patterns among pairs with strong ties

Using large-scale call detail records of anonymised mobile phone service subscribers with demographic and location information, we investigate how a long-distance residential move within the country affects th...

Authors: Mikaela Irene D. Fudolig, Daniel Monsivais, Kunal Bhattacharya, Hang-Hyun Jo and Kimmo Kaski

The growing amplification of social media: measuring temporal and social contagion dynamics for over 150 languages on Twitter for 2009–2020

Working from a dataset of 118 billion messages running from the start of 2009 to the end of 2019, we identify and explore the relative daily use of over 150 languages on Twitter. We find that eight languages c...

Authors: Thayer Alshaabi, David Rushing Dewhurst, Joshua R. Minot, Michael V. Arnold, Jane L. Adams, Christopher M. Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds

Support the underground: characteristics of beyond-mainstream music listeners

Music recommender systems have become an integral part of music streaming services such as Spotify and Last.fm to assist users navigating the extensive music collections offered by them. However, while music l...

Authors: Dominik Kowald, Peter Muellner, Eva Zangerle, Christine Bauer, Markus Schedl and Elisabeth Lex

A bi-directional approach to comparing the modular structure of networks

Here we propose a new method to compare the modular structure of a pair of node-aligned networks. The majority of current methods, such as normalized mutual information, compare two node partitions derived fro...

Authors: Daniel Straulino, Mattie Landman and Neave O’Clery

A data-driven approach for assessing biking safety in cities

With the focus that cities around the world have put on sustainable transportation during the past few years, biking has become one of the foci for local governments globally. Cities all over the world invest ...

Authors: Sara Daraei, Konstantinos Pelechrinis and Daniele Quercia

Understanding vehicular routing behavior with location-based service data

Properly extracting patterns of individual mobility with high resolution data sources such as the one extracted from smartphone applications offers important opportunities. Potential opportunities not offered ...

Authors: Yanyan Xu, Riccardo Di Clemente and Marta C. González

The mobility laws of location-based games

Mobility is a fundamental characteristic of human society that shapes various aspects of our everyday interactions. This pervasiveness of mobility makes it paramount to understand factors that govern human mov...

Authors: Leonardo Tonetto, Eemil Lagerspetz, Aaron Yi Ding, Jörg Ott, Sasu Tarkoma and Petteri Nurmi

Connecting and linking neurocognitive, digital phenotyping, physiologic, psychophysical, neuroimaging, genomic, & sensor data with survey data

Combining survey data with alternative data sources (e.g., wearable technology, apps, physiological, ecological monitoring, genomic, neurocognitive assessments, brain imaging, and psychophysical data) to paint...

Authors: Charles E. Knott, Stephen Gomori, Mai Ngyuen, Susan Pedrazzani, Sridevi Sattaluri, Frank Mierzwa and Kim Chantala

Attention dynamics on the Chinese social media Sina Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic

Understanding attention dynamics on social media during pandemics could help governments minimize the effects. We focus on how COVID-19 has influenced the attention dynamics on the biggest Chinese microbloggin...

Authors: Hao Cui and János Kertész

The rhythms of the night: increase in online night activity and emotional resilience during the spring 2020 Covid-19 lockdown

The lockdown orders established in multiple countries in response to the Covid-19 pandemic are arguably one of the most widespread and deepest shock experienced by societies in recent years. Studying their imp...

Authors: Maria Castaldo, Tommaso Venturini, Paolo Frasca and Floriana Gargiulo

Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: before the vaccine

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers and vendor...

Authors: Alberto Bracci, Matthieu Nadini, Maxwell Aliapoulios, Damon McCoy, Ian Gray, Alexander Teytelboym, Angela Gallo and Andrea Baronchelli

Characteristics of human mobility patterns revealed by high-frequency cell-phone position data

Human mobility is an important characteristic of human behavior, but since tracking personalized position to high temporal and spatial resolution is difficult, most studies on human mobility patterns rely on s...

Authors: Chen Zhao, An Zeng and Chi Ho Yeung

Generalized word shift graphs: a method for visualizing and explaining pairwise comparisons between texts

A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts’ rich stories...

Authors: Ryan J. Gallagher, Morgan R. Frank, Lewis Mitchell, Aaron J. Schwartz, Andrew J. Reagan, Christopher M. Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds

Unraveling the hidden organisation of urban systems and their mobility flows

Increasing evidence suggests that cities are complex systems, with structural and dynamical features responsible for a broad spectrum of emerging phenomena. Here we use a unique data set of human flows and cou...

Authors: Riccardo Gallotti, Giulia Bertagnolli and Manlio De Domenico

Privacy preserving data visualizations

Data visualizations are a valuable tool used during both statistical analysis and the interpretation of results as they graphically reveal useful information about the structure, properties and relationships b...

Authors: Demetris Avraam, Rebecca Wilson, Oliver Butters, Thomas Burton, Christos Nicolaides, Elinor Jones, Andy Boyd and Paul Burton

Challenges when identifying migration from geo-located Twitter data

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and...

Authors: Caitrin Armstrong, Ate Poorthuis, Matthew Zook, Derek Ruths and Thomas Soehl

Estimating tie strength in social networks using temporal communication data

Even though the concept of tie strength is central in social network analysis, it is difficult to quantify how strong social ties are. One typical way of estimating tie strength in data-driven studies has been...

Authors: Javier Ureña-Carrion, Jari Saramäki and Mikko Kivelä

Quantifying the economic impact of disasters on businesses using human mobility data: a Bayesian causal inference approach

In recent years, extreme shocks, such as natural disasters, are increasing in both frequency and intensity, causing significant economic loss to many cities around the world. Quantifying the economic cost of l...

Authors: Takahiro Yabe, Yunchang Zhang and Satish V. Ukkusuri

A multi-layer approach to disinformation detection in US and Italian news spreading on Twitter

We tackle the problem of classifying news articles pertaining to disinformation vs mainstream news by solely inspecting their diffusion mechanisms on Twitter. This approach is inherently simple compared to existi...

Authors: Francesco Pierri, Carlo Piccardi and Stefano Ceri

Scholarly migration within Mexico: analyzing internal migration among researchers using Scopus longitudinal bibliometric data

The migration of scholars is a major driver of innovation and of diffusion of knowledge. Although large-scale bibliometric data have been used to measure international migration of scholars, our understanding ...

Authors: Andrea Miranda-González, Samin Aref, Tom Theile and Emilio Zagheni

A network theory of inter-firm labor flows

Using detailed administrative microdata for two countries, we build a modeling framework that yields new explanations for the origin of firm sizes, the firm contributions to unemployment, and the job-to-job mo...

Authors: Eduardo López, Omar A. Guerrero and Robert L. Axtell

The great divide: drivers of polarization in the US public

Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. being the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To provide insight in...

Authors: Lucas Böttcher and Hans Gersbach

Human biases in body measurement estimation

Body measurements, including weight and height, are key indicators of health. Being able to visually assess body measurements reliably is a step towards increased awareness of overweight and obesity and is thu...

Authors: Kirill Martynov, Kiran Garimella and Robert West

Susceptible-infected-spreading-based network embedding in static and temporal networks

Link prediction can be used to extract missing information, identify spurious interactions as well as forecast network evolution. Network embedding is a methodology to assign coordinates to nodes in a low-dime...

Authors: Xiu-Xiu Zhan, Ziyu Li, Naoki Masuda, Petter Holme and Huijuan Wang

Modeling and predicting evacuation flows during hurricane Irma

Evacuations are a common practice to mitigate the potential risks and damages made by natural disasters. However, without proper coordination and management, evacuations can be inefficient and cause negative i...

Authors: Lingzi Hong and Vanessa Frias-Martinez

Early detection of influenza outbreak using time derivative of incidence

For mitigation strategies of an influenza outbreak, it can be helpful to understand the characteristics of regional and age-group-specific spread. In South Korea, however, there has been no official statistic ...

Authors: Woo-Sik Son, Ji-Eun Park and Okyu Kwon

Estimating educational outcomes from students’ short texts on social media

Digital traces have become an essential source of data in social sciences because they provide new insights into human behavior and allow studies to be conducted on a larger scale. One particular area of inter...

Authors: Ivan Smirnov