Models relating interregional migration and friendship in Russia

Public profiles of social network users can be a source of demographic and sociological information, in particular providing data on the intensity of interregional interaction («region friendship»). Previously user profiles from the VK social network were indexed and processed to form a geotagged database, published within the webcensus.ru project. The present article uses this data to discover relationships between intensities of interregional migration and friendship for municipal districts and regions of Russia. We investigate four models for estimating the amount of friend links between regions using data on the number of migrants between those regions. We show that the model that takes into account the entire system of interregional migration flows is better at predicting the number of friendship links than models which only consider every pair of interacting regions separately from the others.