Computationally inferred genealogical networks uncover long-term trends in assortative mating

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A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

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en

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10

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Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), pp. 883-892

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Genealogical networks, also known as family trees or population pedigrees, are commonly studied by genealogists wanting to know about their ancestry, but they also provide a valuable resource for disciplines such as digital demography, genetics, and computational social science. These networks are typically constructed by hand through a very time-consuming process, which requires comparing large numbers of historical records manually. We develop computational methods for automatically inferring large-scale genealogical networks. A comparison with human-constructed networks attests to the accuracy of the proposed methods. To demonstrate the applicability of the inferred large-scale genealogical networks, we present a longitudinal analysis on the mating patterns observed in a network. This analysis shows a consistent tendency of people choosing a spouse with a similar socioeconomic status, a phenomenon known as assortative mating. Interestingly, we do not observe this tendency to consistently decrease (nor increase) over our study period of 150 years.

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Malmi, E, Gionis, A & Solin, A 2018, Computationally inferred genealogical networks uncover long-term trends in assortative mating. in Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW). ACM, pp. 883-892, The Web Conference, Lyon, France, 23/04/2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186136