Year: 2015
Type: preprint
Abstract: The value of a social network is generally determined by its size and the connectivity of its nodes. But since some of the nodes may be fake ones and others that are dormant, the question of validating the node counts by statistical tests becomes important. In this paper we propose the use of the Benford's distribution to check on the trustworthiness of the connectivity statistics. Our experiments using statistics of both symmetric and asymmetric networks show that when the accumulation processes are random, the convergence to Benford's law is significantly better, and therefore this fact can be used to distinguish between processes which are randomly generated and those with internal dependencies.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Soh, Sieteng, Lin, Gongqi, Kak, Subhash
Institutions: Curtin University, Oklahoma State University
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2229557646