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Temporal Networks of Face-to-Face Human Interactions

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Book cover Temporal Networks

Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

The ever increasing adoption of mobile technologies and ubiquitous services allows to sense human behavior at unprecedented levels of details and scale. Wearable sensors are opening up a new window on human mobility and proximity at the finest resolution of face-to-face proximity. As a consequence, empirical data describing social and behavioral networks are acquiring a longitudinal dimension that brings forth new challenges for analysis and modeling. Here we review recent work on the representation and analysis of temporal networks of face-to-face human proximity, based on large-scale datasets collected in the context of the SocioPatterns collaboration. We show that the raw behavioral data can be studied at various levels of coarse-graining, which turn out to be complementary to one another, with each level exposing different features of the underlying system. We briefly review a generative model of temporal contact networks that reproduces some statistical observables. Then, we shift our focus from surface statistical features to dynamical processes on empirical temporal networks. We discuss how simple dynamical processes can be used as probes to expose important features of the interaction patterns, such as burstiness and causal constraints. We show that simulating dynamical processes on empirical temporal networks can unveil differences between datasets that would otherwise look statistically similar. Moreover, we argue that, due to the temporal heterogeneity of human dynamics, in order to investigate the temporal properties of spreading processes it may be necessary to abandon the notion of wall-clock time in favour of an intrinsic notion of time for each individual node, defined in terms of its activity level. We conclude highlighting several open research questions raised by the nature of the data at hand.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that s i t might be larger than the total time during which i has been in contact with any individual, as i could be in contact at the same time with more than one individual.

  2. 2.

    The system is in a stationary state for b 1 > 0. 5, b 0 > (2λ − 1) ∕ (3λ − 1) and λ > 0. 5, while the self-consistent solution breaks down outside of this parameter region, and non-stationary behavior with the possible formation of large (system-size) groups can be observed [63, 64].

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Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to thank G. Bianconi, V. Colizza, L. Isella, A. Machens, A. Panisson, J.-F. Pinton, M. Quaggiotto, J. Stehlé, W. Van den Broeck, A. Vespignani for many interesting discussions. We also warmly thank all the collaborators who helped make the SocioPatterns deployments possible, and in particular Bitmanufaktur and the OpenBeacon project. Finally, we are grateful to all the volunteers who participated in the deployments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aix Marseille Université, CNRS UMR 7332, CPT, 13288, Marseille, France

    Alain Barrat

  2. Université du Sud Toulon-Var, CNRS UMR 7332, CPT, 83957, La Garde, France

    Alain Barrat

  3. Data Science Laboratory, ISI Foundation, Torino, Italy

    Alain Barrat & Ciro Cattuto

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  1. Alain Barrat
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  2. Ciro Cattuto
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Correspondence to Alain Barrat .

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  1. Ice Lab, Department of Physics, Umeå University, Ice Lab, 3rd floor, NA wing, Naturvetarhuset, Umeå, 901 87, Sweden

    Petter Holme

  2. and Computational Sciences (BECS), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Aalto University, Rakentajanaukio, Otaniemi campus 2, Aalto, 00076, Finland

    Jari Saramäki

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Barrat, A., Cattuto, C. (2013). Temporal Networks of Face-to-Face Human Interactions. In: Holme, P., Saramäki, J. (eds) Temporal Networks. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36461-7_10

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