Wikipedia mining of hidden links between political leaders

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reduced Google matrix method inspired by quantum physics to uncover both direct and hidden links among political leaders in Wikipedia networks across multiple countries.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel reduced Google matrix approach that effectively identifies hidden relationships in large directed networks, with applications to political leader analysis.

Findings

Successfully recovers direct and hidden links among political leaders

Demonstrates applicability across multiple language editions of Wikipedia

Provides a mathematical basis for social and political science studies

Abstract

We describe a new method of reduced Google matrix which allows to establish direct and hidden links between a subset of nodes of a large directed network. This approach uses parallels with quantum scattering theory, developed for processes in nuclear and mesoscopic physics and quantum chaos. The method is applied to the Wikipedia networks in different language editions analyzing several groups of political leaders of USA, UK, Germany, France, Russia and G20. We demonstrate that this approach allows to recover reliably direct and hidden links among political leaders. We argue that the reduced Google matrix method can form the mathematical basis for studies in social and political sciences analyzing Leader-Members eXchange (LMX).