信息与通信技术服务中自我中心社区的同质性组织
Homophilic organization of egocentric communities in ICT services
AI总结：
本研究针对多特征同质性在社区形成中作用不明的问题，分析三类ICT服务网络数据，发现自我中心社区规模与特征重叠度正相关等规律，提出联结添加机制复现实证结果并解释非单调趋势。
摘要：
社会成员可通过大量特征加以表征，例如性别、年龄、种族、宗教、社会地位以及共同参与的活动。人类社会中个体之间建立联结的主要因素之一是同质性（homophily），即被与自身相似的他人吸引的倾向。过往对同质性的研究大多聚焦于单一特征，而关于不同来源的相似性在社区形成中所起的作用，目前人们仍知之甚少。为填补这一研究空白，我们分析了三个来自信息与通信技术（Information and Communications Technology, ICT）服务的数据集，分别是两个在线社交网络以及一个从手机通话推导而来的网络，所有数据集均包含个体特征的元数据。我们在自我中心网络（egocentric networks）中识别出社区，并意外发现：社区规模越大，其成员与自我（ego）的特征重叠程度越高。我们从管理社区所需的精力角度解释这一发现：更高的多样性需要投入更多精力，因此维持一个规模大且多样性高的群体可能会超出成员的能力上限。当自我在ICT服务中接触她的 alters（关联个体）时，我们观察到每个社区中首个关联个体与自我的特征重叠度往往高于其余个体。此外，自我与其所有关联个体的特征重叠度随自我的度（degree）变化呈现出非单调行为。我们提出了一个关于人们如何在其关联个体构成的自我中心网络中添加联结的简单机制，该机制复现了所有实证观测结果，并揭示了自我中心特征重叠度随自我的度变化呈现非单调趋势背后的原因。
英文摘要：
Members of a society can be characterized by a large number of features, such as gender, age, ethnicity, religion, social status, and shared activities. One of the main tie-forming factors between individuals in human societies is homophily, the tendency of being attracted to similar others. Homophily has been mainly studied with focus on one of the features and little is known about the roles of similarities of different origins in the formation of communities. To close this gap, we analyze three datasets from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services, namely, two online social networks and a network deduced from mobile phone calls, in all of which metadata about individual features are available. We identify communities within egocentric networks and surprisingly find that the larger the community is, the more overlap is found between features of its members and the ego. We interpret this finding in terms of the effort needed to manage the communities; the larger diversity requires more effort such that to maintain a large diverse group may exceed the capacity of the members. As the ego reaches out to her alters on an ICT service, we observe that the first alter in each community tends to have a higher feature overlap with the ego than the rest. Moreover the feature overlap of the ego with all her alters displays a non-monotonic behaviors as a function of the ego's degree. We propose a simple mechanism of how people add links in their egocentric networks of alters that reproduces all the empirical observations and shows the reason behind non-monotonic tendency of the egocentric feature overlap as a function of the ego's degree.
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