What determines a song's success at the Eurovision Song Contest? Is it driven by individual taste, geopolitical alliances, or do shared musical structures shape audience preferences? This work uses the Eurovision Song Contest as a natural laboratory to explore the complex interdependencies between music, culture, and politics through the lens of Network Analysis.
Using a purpose-built dataset,...
The Stochastic Block Model (SBM) is a foundational tool in network analysis, often extended to address complex problems in various domains. In this work, we develop a Bayesian network model based on an extension of the SBM where the response is categorical and denotes different type of connections between nodes. The data are represented by a large table which is similar to a contingency table...
Understanding whether and how different patterns of social media (SM) use relate to different users’ wellbeing outcomes has become an urgent academic and public-health issue. This is especially relevant now, as many countries are evaluating and implementing school smartphone bans and age-related restrictions aimed at reducing potentially harmful effects of digital technologies on youngers’...
Research in social psychology consistently shows that men and women differ markedly in their selectivity when choosing partners for casual relationships, with women typically exhibiting more stringent criteria than men. While this robust phenomenon has traditionally been explained through evolutionary or sociocultural frameworks, we propose an alternative mechanism based on network dynamics....
