James Griffin

CS 501R Mid Term

Mid Term Paper

1. Write a two-page report analyzing the social circles model in the link.
The premise of this paper was to try to understand and create better sociological networks
that more accurately depict the world. Building off of the work of previous social network
studies, this paper tried to identify some key characteristics of what modern social networks look
like. Being able to accurately model the world of human interactions is perhaps the most
important step in trying to model the spread of COVID-19. Without this, any algorithm, however
complex and well tested, would fail to accurately show how the virus traverses through a
population.
The writers obviously started with wanting networks to have the following
characteristics: low density, high clustering, limit the size of personal networks, have fat tailed
distributions of connectivity, have communities, and have short path lengths. One of the
characteristics that was particularly interesting was having a social network with fat tails in terms
of distribution of connectivity.
When I first came to BYU, and even when I was in the MTC in Provo, I felt like I would
walk across campus and see so many people I recognized. I grew up in Utah county, went to
Lone Peak High School, played sports, had friends from different high schools, had my ski
friends, and then mission friends. This effect was probably compounded that in the first two
years of school, many of my friends and acquaintances had similar schedules. Freshman and
sophomores tend to have classes in the same buildings, as we take the same general education
classes, and thus walk along similar sidewalks to and from class. My roommates from Arkansas
and New York always commented that I, “knew everybody.” They came from areas where the
church wasn’t as predominate, and thus had less connections prebuilt into their personal
networks when they came to school at BYU.
The authors find four network types common in the literature, which satisfy the wanted
characteristics above to model social interactions well: regular lattice, random, small world and
scale-free networks.
The first simple model implemented takes ideas of social space and distance to measure
interactions by leveraging social circles. By ensuring that interactions could only happen if both
parties knew each other and had the same social reach, the authors were able to achieve
reciprocity. Naturally, the size of someone’s personal network is related to their social reach,
however as they increased the number of nodes in the graph, the social reach of each person was
reduced on average, as the distribution of connectivity approached a normal Poisson distribution.
This simple starting point provides clusters which are determined by the overlapping circles. The
idea is that the closer two people are, the more mutual connections they will have.
Building from this point, the authors wanted to nodes to have multiple reaches. Going
from having to be in the neighboring social network, to being one removed. Coupling this with
allowing different social network sizes, the well-connected people help add the fat tailed feature
to the distribution of degree connectivity. Well-connected individuals however have a slight
constraint on the number of people they can be connected with, seeing as there are fewer well-
connected people, which naturally leads to a lower clustering coefficient than the people with
smaller social networks.
As more and more reaches are added, and as different levels of social networks are
incorporated, we still generally get Poisson distributions with fat tails when the distribution is
skewed to be “elitist” in nature, where there are only a few people with wide social networks a
few with medium and the vast majority with small social networks. When each group has the
same amount of people, the distribution of connectivity is nearly uniform. It is far more likely
that the first instance is more representative of social interactions in actuality. This more
complex structure follows that of the two-step structure, where we have either a uniform
distribution for the number of nodes in the egalitarian splitting of people or a poison in the more
likely elitist perspective.
From these models, we are able to create graphs with the desired characteristics as we
discussed above. They have low density, cut offs for one’s social reach, have high clustering, fat
tailed distributions of connectivity, are assortative by degree of connectivity – well connected
agents tend to be with others similarly connected, we have communities and short path lengths.
However, this model does stand on two important assumptions.
The first being that the model assumes that networks can be added together to create
social networks. We all have relationships, or have had relationships that are more one sided,
weather in dating, work, or somewhere else, this model assumes a symmetry of relationships,
which may not always hold, especially as we increase social network sizes and allow for more
distant connections.
The second important assumption is the use of two dimensional for the social map. As
graphs become more complex and nodes which might not be connected to each other have
connections in other places with other nodes, increasing the dimensionality allows us to solve
this problem. Thus, the restriction of two-dimensional space limits the generalizability to the
model.
These large social networks do a good job at giving a starting place for which to model
social problems and social interactions. The two-reach model seems to be particularly useful, in
its simplicity. It provides the necessary features of a social network, while having easily
interpretable distributions and simple assumptions without having the complexity and longer run
times that would come from a three step or larger graph.

2. Write one more page giving and justifying hypotheses of how COVID-19 might spread
over the network
 This social network provides a fairly accurate depiction of many aspects of life. Our
immediate social networks, and how overlapping our social networks with others increases the
clustering coefficient. The text talks about changing the number having someone’s social reach.
They start with having a reach of 15 and how that will give a personal network of on average of
7 people, where the distribution ranges from 0 to 20. Where if we have a social reach of 30,
personal networks have a range from 11 to 52 with an average of 28. So, the size of a person’s
network, and thus the number of interactions they have, will have a big effect on how the virus
moves through a social network like this. If a very influential, well connected person, becomes
infected, with a reach of 52 were to contract the virus, or someone connected with that person
with a significant reach, the virus has a higher likely hood of spreading through the graph
quicker simply because it would have more opportunities to reproduce and spread.
We have seen in real life, that the Corona Virus disproportionately effect the elderly, who not
only have weaker immune systems, but tend to operate in smaller tighter nit groups. Weather that
be retirement communities, or just with their spouse, the elderly and poor are an example of
those, “less well connected” groups, that if the virus were to get in that social network, the
intimacy of the relationships there, and frequency of interactions would make it difficult in terms
of not spreading the virus.
Weather the connectivity distribution is Poisson or uniform would also have an effect. That
is, if there are differencing numbers of people with large social circles, medium and small, or if
they are all the same. As stipulated above, if a well-connected person were to contract the virus,
then the virus would have more opportunity to spread. So if we are dealing with the Poisson
distribution, and a well-connected person in the elitist group got sick, it could have potentially
damaging ramifications for that cluster. Where if we are drawing from a uniform distribution,
then the probability of infection spreading from one person to another is essentially the same for
everybody, weather they are well connected or not, so understanding this aspect of the network is
very important.
Then finally, understanding how big the network is obviously will affect spread, as the
paper says, increasing the number of nodes sill reduce the social reach on average, and this will
decrease our clustering coefficient. So understanding how nodes, social reach, and assortativity
of degree of connectivity will all play powerful rolls in the interconnectedness of the network
and how that network will be effected as a virus is introduced and traverses through the
population.

3. Write one more page giving and justifying hypotheses for how COVID_19 spread on this
network could be mitigated
 After the most recent BYU basketball game, Alex Barcello, starting point guard and team
captain was asked how was it that the basketball team was able to complete the whole season. In
a year where so many teams had many games canceled, BYU played 24 regular season games,
without having a single covid outbreak cause cancelations and postponements as has happened to
so many other college basketball teams this season. Alex said1 that a combination of luck and a
team emphasis on being a community were what helped get the team through. The nature of a
community, with players and coaches who themselves are very well connected, hanging out after
practice, going to practice, and traveling to games, but otherwise limiting social interactions to
the necessary demands of life helped keep the team covid free. Alex said that the team had been
mature and careful to protect the integrity of their season.
BYU also did not allow fans in the Marriot Center until the last two games of the season, and
when they did, it was a socially distanced crowd of about 2,000 people in a building that holds
nearly ten times that number. Both of these examples are ways to mitigate the spread. Alex and
the team operated in a community, limiting interactions with other people, effectively lowering
the clustering coefficient for the team.
The paper stipulates that many people may know of, or want to have a relationship with a
celebrity, and the same can be said for these athletes. They are very popular, so having the
interactions be required to be two ways, helps limit the contact that these players and
communities such as this, try to manage health of the people within their group.
Like the paper talks about, the social reach of person has a huge effect on the density of the
graph. When the social reach is 15, the density for the network is only 0.7%. Contrast that with a
social reach of 30, the density is 3%, that represents a huge percentage increase in the density of
the network. By simply doubling the reach size, the density goes up by more than 4 times the
original value. So, adding to the strategy of operating in teams and communities, limiting social
reach and interactions, or social distancing is a very effective way to help mitigate the spread of
covid.
Given the information in this paper, and what hypotheses we have stated above, and using
our knowledge from previous homework, we believe that applying the Girvan Newman method
would be a very effective mitigation strategy. The algorithm cuts nodes off from ‘hubs’ in the
graph, forming communities. This helps limit the interactions and cross contamination from
community to community and has the nice side effect reducing the degrees for these hubs. Thus
given this network structure, and our hypothesis, we believe this would be a good way to
mitigate spread and form communities.

1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEGfRRiYy0Q Starting at about 1:30