My Facebook Social Network

Last year, Coursera offered a Social Network Analysis course where the instructor is one of the Computational Social Scientist of Facebook, Lada Adamic. Too bad I did not finish this course because it overlapped with another course I was finishing. When this course is offered again, I will definitely complete this since I have to visualize more graphs that deals with the network of textual data using association rule learning.

So here’s my Facebook social network. I wanted to mine more information about my friends but after Facebook retired Oauth 1.0, it really restricted a lot of information that you can mine from your friends. I guess that’s a good thing because of privacy information concerns. So I can only mine the network map though I found a way to mine my textual posts through the archive feature but I have to build some program, maybe in C++ or Python, to extract the data properly.

The size of each label is based on the mixed degree, meaning our mutual friends. The colors of each line the intensity, the purple being the highest, green is middle and blue is the least.

It is fun to see how my friends (nodes) are clustered together based on their distance of connectivity and how each single friend can be interconnected with two clusters, putting their spot in between as it is the average distance between two clusters.

This is not really a particular big network, consisting of 2,500+ nodes (friends) and 55,000+ edges (how each node is connected). Although with a pretty decent PC running at 8GB RAM, Gephi was already performing slow in running ForceAtlas 2.

See the upper left sub giant network? I probably need to clean up my friends list because they do not make sense. These are my Facebook friends who are closely related to each other by using the recommended friend list of Facebook – a behavioral pattern where a group of men who looks at the stance of your half-naked pictures.

I wonder if there’s any platform where I can upload my big network so you can interactively see the nodes and labels.

English Composition I: Achieving Expertise

My nerd inner self has been turned on! I have been finishing courses on Coursera, Open2Study and I just recently signed up on edX! As what others say, learning doesn’t stop inside the four corners of the classroom as it is an everyday and continuous process until you die.

These past few weeks, I have been very critical and scientific when it comes into my work output. This is common in my chosen field as I deal a lot with data. Statistics is my bread and butter. Normal people do not read boxplots, tree diagrams or association rules. That got me thinking if there is really a communication gap between my statistical and business domain expertise? Note that Data Science also includes programming, too but this happens behind the final outcome of my work. So, I decided to enroll in an English writing class.

This is my first assignment, kind of.

Grammar and I have never been friends. I think this is very empirical that Filipinos are very conscious when they speak or write English because the language is taught ever since we step into preschool years. I could still remember that before my kindergarten graduation, my teacher asked me to write a few words about my dreams and what I wanted to become when I grow up – an architect. She, then, expounded my simple words into a very long valedictory speech which I had to memorize and deliver in front of the my classmates, parents and of course, to my late father and mother.

Life was hard and due to financial constraints, my parents only had the chance to send us, my siblings and I, to a public school. Much to my hardwork and perseverance, I maintained to be in the star section which gave me a lot of opportunities to learn advanced lessons compared to the middle and lower sections. This is where I started to learn to write, not just my name on paper but to actually write essays, read books and study literature.

It was only during highschool that I became very conscious with the mastery of the language. I started avoiding to speak the vernacular during English classes and I have spent a decent amount of time inside the small library of a Christian school where I earned highest honors during the four years of a colorful highschool life. It was a well-paid off valedictory speech again. This time, I had the chance to draft my own which my father put some political kick on it. On the other hand, my English teacher omitted them because of the implication of the school’s stand based on religion. It was a rollercoaster speech!

I did not have the chance to study in my preferred university because I did not really know what to study. So, I ended enrolling in a nearby business school. This was also the time that I started writing a private journal in which I tried to write before bed time (I know that it sounded cliche). Then, one of my closest friends gave me an invite to Livejournal. If you have been on internet for a long time, this was one those that was a great hit the web during 2000’s. My Livejournal account is still active and my first post which I wrote on July 2002 is still active.

A few years back, I decided to start my own self-hosted blog. I made a few extra income with the advertisements as my niche includes photography, fitness and food. I just came back from a long hiatus of blogging because of the heavy workload. To date, I write whatever comes into my mind and part of the reason I joined this class is because I need to rekindle my love for writing. Besides, since that I have been doing Data Science and not a lot of people understand data analysis and Statistics, this is a perfect opportunity for me to hone my writing skill so I can deliver my observation studies hidden behind big data and mathematical jargon to simple and understandable business language.

Feel free to read some of my posts. You may visit my blog on http://www.foxyreign.com

Join us and be one of our classmates!

Facebook Data Visualization

One of the key providers of Big Data is social media and if you know me personally, I am very active on these sites especially Facebook. Normally, I would use Wolfram Alpha to conduct simple regression and mathematical operations where Excel could not handle without using any statistical software until I was forced to learn R language (by the way, if you have time, make time to learn this language – it is very cool).

Anyway, today, I spent my workday learning how to use RapidMiner to do simple text analytics and converting it to a sensible Sentiments Analysis using customer feedback from surveys. As far as my self-training goes, I have just reached progressed of making a vector count of most frequently used words yet I have not created any graphs nor even a simple word cloud. Tell you, becoming a data scientist is really challenging.

Back to my post – Wolfram Alpha offers a free report generation of the basics of your Facebook profile. If you have any questions in interpreting some of these charts, you can ask me or you can always count on Google.

Facebook Activity

Friends Stats

Friend Network

Get yours at http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report