https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40328-4
Regular Article
Effect of the social influence on topological properties of user-object bipartite networks
Research Center of Complex Systems Science,
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai
200093, P.R.
China
a
e-mail: liujg004@gmail.com
Received:
9
April
2013
Received in final form:
18
July
2013
Published online:
20
November
2013
Social influence plays an important role in analyzing online users’ collective behaviors [Salganik et al., Science 311, 854 (2006)]. However, the effect of the social influence from the viewpoint of theoretical model is missing. In this paper, by taking into account the social influence and users’ preferences, we develop a theoretical model to analyze the topological properties of user-object bipartite networks, including the degree distribution, average nearest neighbor degree and the bipartite clustering coefficient, as well as topological properties of the original user-object networks and their unipartite projections. According to the users’ preferences and the global ranking effect, we analyze the theoretical results for two benchmark data sets, Amazon and Bookcrossing, which are approximately consistent with the empirical results. This work suggests that this model is feasible to analyze topological properties of bipartite networks in terms of the social influence and the users’ preferences.
Key words: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag, 2013