Navigating networks by using homophily and degree

Many large distributed systems can be characterized as networks where short paths exist between nearly every pair of nodes. These include social, biological, communication, and distribution networks, which often display power-law or small-world structure. A central challenge of distributed systems i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 105; no. 35; pp. 12758 - 12762
Main Authors Şimşek, Özgür, Jensen, David
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 02.09.2008
National Acad Sciences
Subjects
Approximation
Binomials
Chemicals
Cumulative distribution functions
Estimate reliability
Experimentation
Hyperlinks
Mathematical independent variables
Navigation
Navigation systems
Neighborhoods
Physical Sciences
Social networking
Social networks
Social research
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Summary:Many large distributed systems can be characterized as networks where short paths exist between nearly every pair of nodes. These include social, biological, communication, and distribution networks, which often display power-law or small-world structure. A central challenge of distributed systems is directing messages to specific nodes through a sequence of decisions made by individual nodes without global knowledge of the network. We present a probabilistic analysis of this navigation problem that produces a surprisingly simple and effective method for directing messages. This method requires calculating only the product of the two measures widely used to summarize all local information. It outperforms prior approaches reported in the literature by a large margin, and it provides a formal model that may describe how humans make decisions in sociological studies intended to explore the social network as well as how they make decisions in more naturalistic settings.
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Edited by Peter J. Bickel, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved July 11, 2008
Author contributions: Ö.Ş. and D.J. designed research; Ö.Ş. and D.J. performed research; Ö.Ş. analyzed data; and Ö.Ş. and D.J. wrote the paper.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0800497105