Predicting Social Status via Social Networks: A Case Study on University, Occupation, and Region

Social status refers to the relative position within the society. It is an important notion in sociology and related research. The problem of measuring social status has been studied for many years. Various indicators are proposed to assess social status of individuals, including educational attainment, occupation, and income/wealth. However, these indicators are sometimes difficult to collect or measure. We investigate social networks for alternative measures of social status. Online activities expose certain traits of users in the real world. We are interested in how these activities are related to social status, and how social status can be predicted with social network data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on connecting online activities with social status in reality. In particular, we focus on the network structure of microblogs in this study. A user following another implies some kind of status. We cast the predicted social status of users to the "status" of real-world entities, e.g., universities, occupations, and regions, so that we can compare and validate predicted results with facts in the real world. We propose an efficient algorithm for this task and evaluate it on a dataset consisting of 3.4 million users from Sina Weibo. The result shows that it is possible to predict social status with reasonable accuracy using social network data. We also point out challenges and limitations of this approach, e.g., inconsistence between online popularity and real-world status for certain users. Our findings provide insights on analyzing online social status and future designs of ranking schemes for social networks.