Exploratory Analysis of Pairwise Interactions in Online Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper provides an extensive exploratory analysis of interaction patterns among Facebook users, revealing distributions and correlations across 13 interaction types based on data from over 3,200 users and 1.4 million interactions.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive overview of OSN interaction records, analyzing multiple interaction parameters to understand online social behavior.

Findings

Distribution patterns of interaction types identified

Correlations between different interaction parameters established

Insights into online social behavior for future research

Abstract

In the last few decades sociologists were trying to explain human behaviour by analysing social networks, which requires access to data about interpersonal relationships. This represented a big obstacle in this research field until the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), which vastly facilitated the process of collecting such data. Nowadays, by crawling public profiles on OSNs, it is possible to build a social graph where "friends" on OSN become represented as connected nodes. OSN connection does not necessarily indicate a close real-life relationship, but using OSN interaction records may reveal real-life relationship intensities, a topic which inspired a number of recent researches. Still, published research currently lacks an extensive exploratory analysis of OSN interaction records, i.e. a comprehensive overview of users' interaction via different ways of OSN interaction. In this paper we provide such an overview by leveraging results of conducted extensive social experiment which managed to collect records for over 3,200 Facebook users interacting with over 1,400,000 of their friends. Our exploratory analysis focuses on extracting population distributions and correlation parameters for 13 interaction parameters, providing valuable insight in online social network interaction for future researches aimed at this field of study.