Maximum entropy networks for large scale social network node analysis

Abstract

Recently proposed computational techniques allow the application of various maximum entropy network models at a larger scale. We focus on disinformation campaigns and apply different maximum entropy network models on the collection of datasets from the Twitter information operations report. For each dataset, we obtain additional Twitter data required to build an interaction network. We consider different interaction networks which we compare to an appropriate null model. The null model is used to identify statistically significant interactions. We validate our method and evaluate to what extent it is suited to identify communities of members of a disinformation campaign in a non-supervised way. We find that this method is suitable for larger social networks and allows to identify statistically significant interactions between users. Extracting the statistically significant interaction leads to the prevalence of users involved in a disinformation campaign being higher. We found that the use of different network models can provide different perceptions of the data and can lead to the identification of different meaningful patterns. We also test the robustness of the methods to illustrate the impact of missing data. Here we observe that sampling the correct data is of great importance to reconstruct an entire disinformation operation.