On a triadic approach to connect microstructural properties to social macrostructural patterns

Social macrostructures, such as structural balance, ranked clusters and transitivity, are of great importance on account of their abilities to reflect the underlying social psychological processes about the formation and evolution of relationships among people. Here we present a detailed study on examining the existence and evolution of social macrostructures in an empirical online social network, and exploring how they can be explained by network microstructural properties, i.e. nodal indegree and outdegree and dyadic feature. We establish the micro-macro linkage by analyzing the network triadic patterns. Based on a novel clustering coefficient based network sampling approach, we show that the distribution of observed triad census in our data is low dimensional and can be greatly explained by network dyadic properties. In a time series analysis, we observe that our network exhibits strong tendencies towards balanced, transitive and clustered social macrostructure given the nodal and dyadic characteristics. Our findings supplement the studies on structural properties of online social network by providing more insights on the relation between network macrostructures and the microlevel social processes that result in them. And they form the basis to understand better how online social media systems change the information and communication fabric of our society.