Bursty egocentric network evolution in Skype

Abstract

In this study we analyze the dynamics of the contact list evolution of millions of users of the Skype communication network. We find that egocentric networks evolve heterogeneously in time as events of edge additions and deletions of individuals are grouped in long bursty clusters, which are separated by long inactive periods. We classify users by their link creation dynamics and show that bursty peaks of contact additions are likely to appear shortly after user account creation. We also study possible relations between bursty contact addition activity and other user-initiated actions like free and paid service adoption events. We show that bursts of contact additions are associated with increases in activity and adoption - an observation that can inform the design of targeted marketing tactics.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Social Network Analysis and Mining (2013

Temporal Patterns of Communication in Social Networks

“…3.10 indicate a heterogenous pattern of activity and, despite the exponential cut-off, small inter-event times are significantly more probable than an exponential distribution. This is in line with previous research that has shown that the nature of link creation process in online social networks is broad and follows a power-law distribution (Gaito et al 2012;Kikas et al 2012;. In these studies the bursty behavior of tie creation is usually associated to an acceleration (or exploration) phase in which tie formation rapidly increases.…”

“…This filtering is because the activity of nodes that subscribed/unsubscribed just before/after Ω may introduce spurious effects in the analysis of edge dynamics. Specifically, we would observe a rapid growth of their social network at the beginning of the observation window or a fast dissolution at its end (Gaito et al 2012;Kikas et al 2012). The latter filtering results in the removal of about the 17% of nodes and the 37% of reciprocated links.…”

Evolution of Ego-networks in Social Media with Link Recommendations

“…Multiple techniques have been proposed to discover social or topical sub-groups within ego-networks [53,37,40,13], but with little attention to the dynamics of their growth. Kikas et al conducted one of the few studies touching upon the the temporal evolution of ego-networks, using a dataset of Skype contacts [30]. They find that most edges are added in short bursts separated by long inactivity intervals.…”

“…Creation of links is not uniform in time. Previous literature found evidence that, globally, the creation of links happens in bursts [32,30]. At a local level, we aim to learn how often and in which phases of the ego-network life users select new neighbors.…”

“…Because they provide the view of the social world from a personal perspective, these structures are fundamental information blocks to understand how individual behaviour is linked to group life and societal dynamics. Despite the growing availability of interaction data from online social media, little research has been conducted to unveil the structure and evolutionary dynamics of ego-networks [4,30]. In an online context, people expand their social circles also as a result of automatic recommendations that are offered Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”