research-article

Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks

Authors:

Jimeng SunAuthors Info & Claims

KDD '13: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining

Pages 347 - 355

https://doi.org/10.1145/2487575.2487691

Published: 11 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in opinion or behavior in order to fit in with a group. Employing several social networks as the source for our experimental data, we study how the effect of conformity plays a role in changing users' online behavior. We formally define several major types of conformity in individual, peer, and group levels. We propose Confluence model to formalize the effects of social conformity into a probabilistic model. Confluence can distinguish and quantify the effects of the different types of conformities. To scale up to large social networks, we propose a distributed learning method that can construct the Confluence model efficiently with near-linear speedup. Our experimental results on four different types of large social networks, i.e., Flickr, Gowalla, Weibo and Co-Author, verify the existence of the conformity phenomena. Leveraging the conformity information, Confluence can accurately predict actions of users. Our experiments show that Confluence significantly improves the prediction accuracy by up to 5-10% compared with several alternative methods.

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Cited By

Liu XKato SGu WRen FSu GZhang M(2025)Diffusion of Ordinal Opinions in Social Networks: An Agent-Based Model and Heuristics for CampaigningIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2024.345895012:1(335-347)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2024.3458950
Singh SSrivastava DVerma MMuhuri S(2025)Information diffusion analysis: process, model, deployment, and applicationThe Knowledge Engineering Review10.1017/S026988892400010939Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888924000109
Arya PSrivastava N(2025)Characterizing the roles of preference homophily and network structure on outcomes of consensus gamesComputational and Mathematical Organization Theory10.1007/s10588-025-09396-3Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-025-09396-3
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Sociology
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval

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cover image ACM Conferences

KDD '13: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining

August 2013

1534 pages

ISBN:9781450321747

DOI:10.1145/2487575

Editors:
Rayid Ghani
University of Chicago
,
Ted E. Senator
SAIC
,
Paul Bradley
MethodCare, Inc.
,
Rajesh Parekh
Groupon
,
Jingrui He
Stevens Institute of Technology
,
General Chairs:
Robert L. Grossman
University of Chicago and Open Data Group
,
Ramasamy Uthurusamy
General Motors Corporation (retired)
,
Program Chairs:
Inderjit S. Dhillon
University of Texas
,
Yehuda Koren
Google

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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Published: 11 August 2013

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KDD' 13

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KDD' 13: The 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

August 11 - 14, 2013

Illinois, Chicago, USA

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KDD '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 125 of 726 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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Cited By

Liu XKato SGu WRen FSu GZhang M(2025)Diffusion of Ordinal Opinions in Social Networks: An Agent-Based Model and Heuristics for CampaigningIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2024.345895012:1(335-347)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2024.3458950
Singh SSrivastava DVerma MMuhuri S(2025)Information diffusion analysis: process, model, deployment, and applicationThe Knowledge Engineering Review10.1017/S026988892400010939Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888924000109
Arya PSrivastava N(2025)Characterizing the roles of preference homophily and network structure on outcomes of consensus gamesComputational and Mathematical Organization Theory10.1007/s10588-025-09396-3Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-025-09396-3
Gökçen Kapusuz AMilandou G(2024)KONFORMİZM ve İŞTEN AYRILMA NİYETİ İLİŞKİSİ: İŞE ADANMIŞLIĞIN ARACI ROLÜIzmir Democracy University Social Sciences Journal10.61127/idusos.14548297:1(103-118)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.61127/idusos.1454829
Wang LZhang JYang HChen ZTang JZhang ZChen XLin YSun HSong RZhao XXu JDou ZWang JWen J(2024)User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model-based AgentsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/370898543:2(1-37)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3708985
Jiao XWan SLiu QBi YLee YXu EHao DZhou T(2024)Comparing discriminating abilities of evaluation metrics in link predictionJournal of Physics: Complexity10.1088/2632-072X/ad46be5:2(025014)Online publication date: 16-May-2024
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Greco GManna M(2024)Discrete preference games with logic-based agentsArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2024.104131332:COnline publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.artint.2024.104131
Milan Togy George Kanjirathinkal Sen Johnson Anandu S. Nair Tom George Kalayilparampil Krupa Dinah Mathews (2023)The Relationship Between Conformity and Comprehensive Thinking Styles Among Emerging Adultsinternational journal of engineering technology and management sciences10.46647/ijetms.2023.v07i04.0787:4(574-579)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.46647/ijetms.2023.v07i04.078
Sun XCheng HLiu BLi JChen HXu GYin H(2023)Self-Supervised Hypergraph Representation Learning for Sociological AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2023.323531235:11(11860-11871)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
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Arya PSrivastava N(2023)Understanding Clique Formation in Social Networks - An Agent-Based Model of Social Preferences in Fixed and Dynamic NetworksSocial, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling10.1007/978-3-031-43129-6_23(231-240)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2023
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