Social network analysis based on canteen transaction records

摘要

College students' social network could influence their academic performance, attrition, and even mental health. Unfortunately, it is not easy to collect college students' social network information. The existing methods (e.g., collecting data via survey, online social network web sites and phone call records) suffer from various shortcomings. In this paper we present a case study in which the college students' social network is extracted from their canteen transaction records. In detail, we empirically collect a canteen transaction data set which has 4.5 million transaction records of 16 thousand undergraduate students during one semester (112 days). We propose a systematic method to extract the canteen social network. Based on the extracted network, we calculate some network attributes for each student, and employ regression analysis to study the relationships between students' network attributes and academic performance. The findings of this case study encourage us to build more rigorous statistical methods to extract social network from transaction records, and to examine the effects of network attributes.