Two types of densification scaling in the evolution of temporal networks

Abstract

Many real-world social networks constantly change their global properties over time, such as the number of edges, size and density. While temporal and local properties of social networks have been extensively studied, the origin of their dynamical nature is not yet well understood. Networks may grow or shrink if a) the total population of nodes changes and/or b) the chance of two nodes being connected varies over time. Here, we develop a method that allows us to classify the source of time-varying nature of temporal networks. In doing so, we first show empirical evidence that real-world dynamical systems could be categorized into two classes, the difference of which is characterized by the way the number of edges grows with the number of active nodes, i.e., densification scaling. We develop a dynamic hidden-variable model to formally characterize the two dynamical classes. The model is fitted to the empirical data to identify whether the origin of scaling comes from a changing population in the system or shifts in the connecting probabilities.

arXiv comment12 pages, 6 figures (plus 7 figures in SI)

References in corpus (22)

• Emergence of scaling in random networks
• Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks
• Structure of Growing Networks: Exact Solution of the Barabasi--Albert's Model
• Organization of Growing Random Networks
• High-resolution measurements of face-to-face contact patterns in a primary school
• Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks
• What's in a crowd? Analysis of face-to-face behavioral networks
• High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID
• Contact patterns in a high school: a comparison between data collected using wearable sensors, contact diaries and friendship surveys
• Class of correlated random networks with hidden variables
• Prominence and control: The weighted rich-club effect
• Graph Evolution: Densification and Shrinking Diameters
• Can co-location be used as a proxy for face-to-face contacts?
• Data on face-to-face contacts in an office building suggests a low-cost vaccination strategy based on community linkers
• A fitness model for the Italian Interbank Money Market
• Effect of the accelerating growth of communications networks on their structure
• Circadian pattern and burstiness in mobile phone communication
• Modeling human dynamics of face-to-face interaction networks
• Networked relationships in the e-MID Interbank market: A trading model with memory
• Topological properties of a time-integrated activity driven network
• The structured backbone of temporal social ties
• Social dynamics of financial networks

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Modeling framework unifying contact and social networks
• The switching mechanisms of social network densification
• Identifying the temporal dynamics of densification and sparsification in human contact networks