Attributed stream-hypernetwork analysis: homophilic behaviors in pairwise and group political discussions on reddit

Failla A., Citraro S., Rossetti G.

Data analysis  Dynamic networks  High-order networks  Feature-rich networks 

Complex networks are solid models to describe human behavior. However, most analyses employing them are bounded to observations made on dyadic connectivity, whereas complex human dynamics involve higher-order relations as well. In the last few years, hypergraph models are rising as promising tools to better understand the behavior of social groups. Yet even such higher-order representations ignore the importance of the rich attributes carried by the nodes. In this work we introduce ASH, an Attributed Stream-Hypernetwork framework to model higher-order temporal networks with attributes on nodes. We leverage ASH to study pairwise and group political discussions on the well-known Reddit platform. Our analysis unveils different patterns while looking at either a pairwise or a higher-order structure for the same phenomena. In particular, we find out that Reddit users tend to surround themselves by like-minded peers with respect to their political leaning when online discussions are proxied by pairwise interactions; conversely, such a tendency significantly decreases when considering nodes embedded in higher-order contexts - that often describe heterophilic discussions.

Source: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 - Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications, pp. 150–161, Palermo, Italy, 08-10/11/2022

Publisher: Springer, Berlin , Germania

Metrics