Matrix and Graph Operations for Relationship Inference: An Illustration with the Kinship Inference in the China Biographical Database
This work addresses the challenge of uncovering unrecorded communities in historical databases for researchers in digital humanities and social sciences, though it appears incremental in applying known techniques to a specific dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of inferring hidden relationships like kinship and friendship from biographical databases, demonstrating that simple matrix and graph operations can effectively reveal these connections, as illustrated with the China Biographical Database.
Biographical databases contain diverse information about individuals. Person names, birth information, career, friends, family and special achievements are some possible items in the record for an individual. The relationships between individuals, such as kinship and friendship, provide invaluable insights about hidden communities which are not directly recorded in databases. We show that some simple matrix and graph-based operations are effective for inferring relationships among individuals, and illustrate the main ideas with the China Biographical Database (CBDB).