Abstract
Interactions between countries originate from diverse aspects such as geographic proximity, trade, socio-cultural habits, language, religions, etc. Geopolitics studies the influence of a country’s geographic space on its political power and its relationships with other countries. This work reveals the potential of Wikipedia mining for geopolitical study. Actually, Wikipedia offers solid knowledge and strong correlations among countries by linking web pages together for different types of information (e.g. economical, historical, political, and many others). The major finding of this paper is to show that meaningful results on the influence of country ties can be extracted from the hyperlinked structure of Wikipedia. We leverage a novel stochastic matrix representation of Markov chains of complex directed networks called the reduced Google matrix theory. For a selected small size set of nodes, the reduced Google matrix concentrates direct and indirect links of the million-node sized Wikipedia network into a small Perron-Frobenius matrix keeping the PageRank probabilities of the global Wikipedia network. We perform a novel sensitivity analysis that leverages this reduced Google matrix to characterize the influence of relationships between countries from the global network. We apply this analysis to two chosen sets of countries (i.e. the set of 27 European Union countries and a set of 40 top worldwide countries). We show that with our sensitivity analysis we can exhibit easily very meaningful information on geopolitics from five different Wikipedia editions (English, Arabic, Russian, French and German).
Highlights
Relationships between countries have always been of utmost interest to study for countries themselves as they have to be accounted for into any country’s strategic and diplomatic plan
Most relevant to the study presented in this paper, the work in [17] shows that reduced Google matrix is a perfect candidate for analyzing the geopolitics interactions between countries selected worldwide for 5 different Wikipedia language editions for two reasons: 1) Indirect interactions components of GR capture reasonable and relevant information about hidden relationships between countries identified as hidden friends and followers 2) Part of the interactions are cross-cultural while others are clearly biased by the culture of the authors
Reduced Google matrix has been computed, together with its components Grr, Gpr and Gqr, for the English language edition of Wikipedia (EnWiki) and for the 2 selected sets of 27 and 40 countries listed in Tables 1 and 2
Summary
Relationships between countries have always been of utmost interest to study for countries themselves as they have to be accounted for into any country’s strategic and diplomatic plan. Most relevant to the study presented in this paper, the work in [17] shows that reduced Google matrix is a perfect candidate for analyzing the geopolitics interactions between countries selected worldwide for 5 different Wikipedia language editions for two reasons: 1) Indirect interactions components of GR capture reasonable and relevant information about hidden relationships between countries identified as hidden friends and followers 2) Part of the interactions are cross-cultural while others are clearly biased by the culture of the authors. This work has assessed the validity of the reduced Google matrix approach for the study of geopolitical interactions It has extracted meaningful pieces of information from the intrinsic structure of the Wikipedia network by revealing the existence of indirect relationships between countries. We introduce the Reduced Google Matrix that offers a complementary analysis that extracts the importance of the indirect interactions between a set of nodes of the original network.
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