Bipartite Structures in Social Networks: Traditional versus Entropy-Driven Analyses

A special type of social networks is the so-called affiliation network, consisting of two modes of vertices: actors and events. Up to now, in the undirected case, the closeness of actors in such networks has been measured by their jointly-attended events. Indirect contacts and attenuated and directed links are of minor interest in affiliation networks. These flaws make a veritable estimation of, e.g., possible message transfers amongst actors questionable. In this contribution, first, we discuss these matters from a graph-theoretical point of view. Second, so as to avoid the identified weaknesses, we propose an up-and-coming entropy-based approach for modeling such networks in their generic structure, replacing directed (attenuated) links by conditionals: if-then. In this framework, the contribution of actors and events to a reliable message transfer from one actor to another – even via intermediaries – is then calculated applying the principle of maximum entropy. The usefulness of this new approach is demonstrated by the analysis of an affiliation network called “corporate directors”.