Modeling affiliations in networks

Abstract

One way to help understand the structure of certain networks is to examine what common group memberships the actors in the network share. Linking actors to their common affiliations gives an alternative type of network commonly called an affiliation network. Recently, there have been several studies examining the problem of modeling the dynamics of a network through the changes in the affiliations of its actors. We examine the closely related problem of modeling the affiliations for a given network. We especially focus on the case of trying to mine these affiliations when the original network is potentially missing links.