In this paper, to reveal the differences of gender-specific preference and the factors affecting potential mate choice in online dating, we analyze the users’ behavioral data of a large online dating site in China. We find that for women, network measures of popularity and activity of the men they contact are significantly positively associated with their messaging behaviors, while for men only the network measures of popularity of the women they contact are significantly positively associated with their messaging behaviors. Secondly, when women send messages to men, they pay attention to not only whether men’s attributes meet their own requirements for mate choice, but also whether their own attributes meet men’s requirements, while when men send messages to women, they only pay attention to whether women’s attributes meet their own requirements. Thirdly, compared with men, women attach great importance to the socio-economic status of potential partners and their own socio-economic status will affect their enthusiasm for interaction with potential mates. Further, we use the ensemble learning classification methods to rank the importance of factors predicting messaging behaviors, and find that the centrality indices of users are the most important factors. Finally, by correlation analysis we find that men and women show different strategic behaviors when sending messages. Compared with men, for women sending messages, there is a stronger positive correlation between the centrality indices of women and men, and more women tend to send messages to people more popular than themselves. These results have implications for understanding gender-specific preference in online dating further and designing better recommendation engines for potential dates. The research also suggests new avenues for data-driven research on stable matching and strategic behavior combined with game theory.

 

Gender-specific preference in online dating
Xixian Su and Haibo Hu
EPJ Data Science 2019 8:12

Source: epjdatascience.springeropen.com

Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts — from language and music to literature and science — yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information. Although information theory provides tools to quantify the information produced by a system, traditional metrics do not account for the inefficient and biased ways that humans process this information. Here we develop an analytical framework to study the information generated by a system as perceived by a human observer. We demonstrate experimentally that this perceived information depends critically on a system’s network topology. Applying our framework to several real networks, we find that they communicate a large amount of information (having high entropy) and do so efficiently (maintaining low divergence from human expectations). Moreover, we show that such efficient communication arises in networks that are simultaneously heterogeneous, with high-degree hubs, and clustered, with tightly-connected modules — the two defining features of hierarchical organization. Together, these results suggest that many real networks are constrained by the pressures of information transmission, and that these pressures select for specific structural features.

 

Human information processing in complex networks

Christopher W. Lynn, Lia Papadopoulos, Ari E. Kahn, Danielle S. Bassett

Source: arxiv.org

From fake news to innovative technologies, many contagions spread via a process of social reinforcement, where multiple exposures are distinct from prolonged exposure to a single source. Contrarily, biological agents such as Ebola or measles are typically thought to spread as simple contagions. Here, we demonstrate that interacting simple contagions are indistinguishable from complex contagions. In the social context, our results highlight the challenge of identifying and quantifying mechanisms, such as social reinforcement, in a world where an innumerable amount of ideas, memes and behaviors interact. In the biological context, this parallel allows the use of complex contagions to effectively quantify the non-trivial interactions of infectious diseases.

 

Interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Samuel V. Scarpino, Jean-Gabriel Young

Source: arxiv.org

Complex networks have been successfully used to describe the spread of diseases in populations of interacting individuals. Conversely, pairwise interactions are often not enough to characterize social contagion processes such as opinion formation or the adoption of novelties, where complex mechanisms of influence and reinforcement are at work. Here we introduce a higher-order model of social contagion in which a social system is represented by a simplicial complex and contagion can occur through interactions in groups of different sizes. Numerical simulations of the model on both empirical and synthetic simplicial complexes highlight the emergence of novel phenomena such as a discontinuous transition induced by higher-order interactions. We show analytically that the transition is discontinuous and that a bistable region appears where healthy and endemic states co-exist. Our results help explain why critical masses are required to initiate social changes and contribute to the understanding of higher-order interactions in complex systems.

 

Simplicial models of social contagion
Iacopo Iacopini, Giovanni Petri, Alain Barrat & Vito Latora
Nature Communications 10, Article number: 2485 (2019)

Source: www.nature.com