Latent Interrelationships among Items in Interrelationships among Bloggers

Abstract

The network of bloggers interconnected by the comment exchange relationship obviously represents an aspect of human relationships. The paper reveals that interrelationships among items (such as products and works of art) can also be inferred based on structural characteristics of the network as follows. First, for each of two items in question, a set of bloggers writing about the item is respectively built. By “plotting” members of each blogger set on the network described above, distributions of the blogger sets are obtained. Then, selecting an appropreate index for measuring proximity of the distributions brings in a correlation between the proximity and the relevance of the items.