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Consider a user on a social media platform on which she can either receive friend requests or send them. If $S$ denotes the action of sending and $R$ that of receiving a friend request, then the user's action will be a vector of $S$ and $R$. Is there a way to check if:

  • Receiving requests tempts users to send or
  • The acts of sending and receiving are independent.

Let us assume that we have data about a large number of users. How to model this problem? Is there a way to check if the $S$ events are dependent on $R$ events? (or whether they are independent?)

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Like for any other data analysis, the very first thing to do is to look at the data (so called IOTT - Inter Occular Trauma Test- see if the data tells you something which hits you between the eyes).
In this case, it would be a simple scatter plot, ploting $R$'s against $S$'s (or vice versa). That plot alone will tell you a lot; can you see any kind of correlation between the 2 counts of events? If they look independent, then they are (yes, you can run statistical tests to formalize this, but you already know the answer). If there is some kind of trend, then you also know the answer; they are not independent.
Now, you can quantify this in/dependence. The simplest is a linear regression, $S=b_0+b_1.R$. You can add higher order terms ($R^2, R^3$) to your regression, if needed. You will get coefficients of (linear) correlation R, you will get confidence intervals (CI) and p-values on the coefficients $b_0$ and $b_1$, etc. and from that you can determine if the correlation is statistically significant.
But I am afraid that what I described above may be a bit naive. This treats all the users as a single homogenuous population. But it would seem that a frequent user of the platform may behave differently than a very occasional user, that a long time user may behave differently than a newbie, that a gen X user may behave differently than a boomer, etc... If you find no correlation, it may not be because there is none, but because, when "averaged" over all user categories, the dependencies cancel out. So you may want to categorize your users, and either analyze each category separately, or add this predictor (user group) to the regression (it will give you different equations, and results, for the different categories). It is also not clear that your data corresponds to the exact same time period for all users (there may be 10 years of data for 1 user, and only 10 days for another). So the duration of the observation should be made equal, or the users should be inversely weighted by their duration of observations. And users at the launch of the platform may not behave as they do today... The whole point is that I doubt you have homogenuous data (aka identically distributed), so any formal statistical test is basically pointless; you will need to slice and dice it until you can be reasonably sure it is homogenuous.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks this answer was super helpful. I was thinking about it independently and was veering towards the same direction. There is one point, I didn't fully understand in your answer. What does "the users should be inversely weighted by their duration of observations" mean? $\endgroup$
    – Amey Joshi
    Commented Aug 15 at 20:57
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    $\begingroup$ Say user1 has 1 month worth of data, and user2 has 10 months; you should divive the # of events (R oand S) by 1 for user 1, and by 10 for user 2. So the unit is "events per user-month" for all users. Now you can pick month, or week, or day or year... as your time basis. Or you could multiply the events for user1 by 12, and for user2 by 1.2 (to use 12 months, 1 year, as the time basis). Otherwise the weight of some users (long time users) will dominate. Note that you do not need to do this for regression; but you would need to do it for computing means/std, compare different groups, etc. $\endgroup$
    – jginestet
    Commented Aug 15 at 22:07

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