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From calls to communities: a model for time-varying social networks

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Abstract

Social interactions vary in time and appear to be driven by intrinsic mechanisms that shape the emergent structure of social networks. Large-scale empirical observations of social interaction structure have become possible only recently, and modelling their dynamics is an actual challenge. Here we propose a temporal network model which builds on the framework of activity-driven time-varying networks with memory. The model integrates key mechanisms that drive the formation of social ties – social reinforcement, focal closure and cyclic closure, which have been shown to give rise to community structure and small-world connectedness in social networks. We compare the proposed model with a real-world time-varying network of mobile phone communication, and show that they share several characteristics from heterogeneous degrees and weights to rich community structure. Further, the strong and weak ties that emerge from the model follow similar weight-topology correlations as real-world social networks, including the role of weak ties.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de l’Informatique du Parallélisme, INRIA-UMR 5668, IXXI, ENS de Lyon, 69364, Lyon, France

    Guillaume Laurent & Márton Karsai

  2. Department of Computer Science, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 15400, 00076, Aalto, Finland

    Guillaume Laurent & Jari Saramäki

Authors
  1. Guillaume Laurent
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  2. Jari Saramäki
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  3. Márton Karsai
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Correspondence to Márton Karsai.

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Laurent, G., Saramäki, J. & Karsai, M. From calls to communities: a model for time-varying social networks. Eur. Phys. J. B 88, 301 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2015-60481-x

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