Abstract
Online platforms offer new opportunities to study human behavior. However, while social scientists are often interested in using behavioral trace data—data created by a user over the course of their everyday life—to draw inferences about users, many online platforms only allow data to be sampled based on user activities (leading to data sets that are biased toward highly active users). Here, we introduce a simple method for reweighting activity-based sample statistics in order to provide descriptive (and potentially model-based) estimates of the user population. We illustrate these techniques by applying them to a case study of an online fitness community (Strava) and use it to explore basic network properties. Last, we explore the weights effect on model-based estimates for count data.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
