If you are friends with Jessie, and Jessie is friends with Amy, there is a good chance you’ll eventually become friends with Amy too. In terms of a graph, this would be like a graph with three nodes and two relationships eventually building a third relationship to form a clique. This simple concept is one of the basis for recommendation engines. There are fancy terms for it, like “triadic closure” but basically it just means we are making triangles. But what about Amy’s friend Delilah? Is there a good chance now that you are friends with Amy that you’ll become friends with her? What about Jessie and Delilah? Can we extend the pattern to four nodes or five nodes and go beyond our simple triangle? Continue reading
