Intergroup networks as random threshold graphs.

ABSTRACT

Similar-minded people tend to form social groups. Due to pluralistic homophily as well as a sort of heterophily, people also participate in a wide variety of groups. Thus, these groups generally overlap with each other; an overlap between two groups can be characterized by the number of common members. These common members can play a crucial role in the transmission of information between the groups. As a step towards understanding the information dissemination, we perceive the system as a pruned intergroup network and show that it maps to a very basic graph theoretic concept known as a threshold graph. We analyze several structural properties of this network such as degree distribution, largest component size, edge density, and local clustering coefficient. We compare the theoretical predictions with the results obtained from several online social networks (LiveJournal, Flickr, YouTube) and find a good match.