The Slashdot Zoo: Mining a Social Network with Negative Edges

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Abstract

We analyse the corpus of user relationships of the Slash- dot technology news site. The data was collected from the Slashdot Zoo feature where users of the website can tag other users as friends and foes, providing positive and negative en- dorsements. We adapt social network analysis techniques to the problem of negative edge weights. In particular, we con- sider signed variants of global network characteristics such as the clustering coefficient, node-level characteristics such as centrality and popularity measures, and link-level character- istics such as distances and similarity measures. We evaluate these measures on the task of identifying unpopular users, as well as on the task of predicting the sign of links and show that the network exhibits multiplicative transitivity which allows algebraic methods based on matrix multiplication to be used. We compare our methods to traditional methods which are only suitable for positively weighted edges.