Modeling relational events via latent classes

Abstract

Many social networks can be characterized by a sequence of dyadic interactions between individuals. Techniques for analyzing such events are of increasing interest. In this paper, we describe a generative model for dyadic events, where each event arises from one of C latent classes, and the properties of the event (sender, recipient, and type) are chosen from distributions over these entities conditioned on the chosen class. We present two algorithms for inference in this model: an expectation-maximization algorithm as well as a Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure based on collapsed Gibbs sampling. To analyze the model's predictive accuracy, the algorithms are applied to multiple real-world data sets involving email communication, international political events, and animal behavior data.