Computation of the greatest regular equivalence

Abstract

The notion of social roles is a centerpiece of most sociological theoretical considerations. Regular equivalences were introduced by White and Reitz in [15] as the least restrictive among the most commonly used definitions of equivalence in social network analysis. In this paper we consider a generalisation of this notion to a bipartite case. We define a pair of regular equivalences on a two-mode social network and we provide an algorithm for computing the greatest pair of regular equivalences.