Recovering Social Networks by Observing Votes

We investigate how to reconstruct social networks from voting data. In particular, given a voting model that considers social network structure, we aim to find the network that best explains the agents’ votes. We study two plausible voting models, one edge-centric and the other vertex-centric. For these models, we give algorithms and lower bounds, characterizing cases where network recovery is possible and where it is computationally difficult. We also test our algorithms on United States Senate data. Despite the similarity of the two models, we show that their respective network recovery problems differ in complexity and involve distinct algorithmic challenges. Moreover, the networks produced when working under these models can also differ significantly. These results indicate that great care should be exercised when choosing a voting model for network recovery tasks.