[YPNG] YPNG Friday 24 August, 11:00--1:00

[Sekhar Tatikonda]

Hi Folks,

This Friday Derek Feng will present:

"Testing for Balance in Social Networks"

Friendship and antipathy exist in concert with one another in real social
networks.  Despite the role they play in social interactions, antagonistic
ties are poorly understood and infrequently measured. One important theory
of negative ties that has received relatively little empirical evaluation
is balance theory, the codification of the adage `the enemy of my enemy is
my friend' and similar sayings. Unbalanced triangles are those with an odd
number of negative ties, and the theory posits that such triangles are
rare. To test for balance, previous works have utilized a permutation test
on the edge signs. The flaw in this method, however, is that it assumes
that negative and positive edges are interchangeable. In reality, they
could not be more different. Here, we propose a novel test of balance that
accounts for this discrepancy and show that our test is more accurate at
detecting balance. Along the way, we prove asymptotic normality of the test
statistic under our null model, which is of independent interest. Our case
study is a novel dataset of signed networks we collected from 32 isolated,
rural villages in Honduras. Contrary to previous results, we find that
there is only marginal evidence for balance in social tie formation in this
setting.

See you Friday at 11 in the Stat's classroom.

Regards,
Sekhar
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