I'm by no means an expert, but I think you're confused as to how NNs work.
>Extrapolating from this fact, shouldn't the patterns (and hence the logic) within social networks hold meaning?
Most likely not. Neural nets are trained to map relations between inputs and outputs. The way that each neuron relates to the others is set, during training, so that when you present a given input to the network, you get something close to the expected output. In a social network, you basically just have a (somehow weighted) graph of people, but you lack the means to "train" it. If you somehow found a way to use the social graph as a pre-trained neural net, you'd most likely get the old "garbage in - garbage out".
Also, what kind of inputs and outputs would you expect to use?
I think you'd be better off thinking of ways to exploit the social graph just as a graph (if you could have access to it, that is).
Comments
I'm by no means an expert, but I think you're confused as to how NNs work.
>Extrapolating from this fact, shouldn't the patterns (and hence the logic) within social networks hold meaning?
Most likely not. Neural nets are trained to map relations between inputs and outputs. The way that each neuron relates to the others is set, during training, so that when you present a given input to the network, you get something close to the expected output. In a social network, you basically just have a (somehow weighted) graph of people, but you lack the means to "train" it. If you somehow found a way to use the social graph as a pre-trained neural net, you'd most likely get the old "garbage in - garbage out".
Also, what kind of inputs and outputs would you expect to use?
I think you'd be better off thinking of ways to exploit the social graph just as a graph (if you could have access to it, that is).