Keywords
Synthetic networks, attributes based network, social networks, multi link generator, complex network generator
Abstract
An application area of increasing importance is creating agent-based simulations to model human societies. One component of developing these simulations is the ability to generate realistic human social networks. Online social networking websites, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, have increased in popularity in the last decade. Despite the increase in online social networking tools and the importance of studying human behavior in these networks, collecting data directly from these networks is not always feasible due to privacy concerns. Previous work in this area has primarily been limited to 1) network generators that aim to duplicate a small subset of the original network's properties and 2) problem-specific generators for applications such as the evaluation of community detection algorithms. In this thesis, we extended two synthetic network generators to enable them to duplicate the properties of a specific dataset. In the first generator, we consider feature similarity and label homophily among individuals when forming links. The second generator is designed to handle multiplex networks that contain different link types. We evaluate the performance of both generators on existing real-world social network datasets, as well as comparing our methods with a related synthetic network generator. In this thesis, we demonstrate that the proposed synthetic network generators are both time efficient and require only limited parameter optimization.
Notes
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Graduation Date
2014
Semester
Fall
Advisor
Sukthankar, Gita
Degree
Master of Science in Computer Engineering (M.S.Cp.E.)
College
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Department
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Degree Program
Computer Engineering
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0005532
URL
http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005532
Language
English
Release Date
December 2014
Length of Campus-only Access
None
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
Subjects
Dissertations, Academic -- Engineering and Computer Science; Engineering and Computer Science -- Dissertations, Academic
STARS Citation
Ali, Awrad Mohammed, "Synthetic generators for simulating social networks" (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4789.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/4789