Identifying the temporal dynamics of densification and sparsification in human contact networks

Abstract

Temporal social networks of human interactions are preponderant in understanding the fundamental patterns of human behavior. In these networks, interactions occur locally between individuals (i.e., nodes) who connect with each other at different times, culminating into a complex system-wide web that has a dynamic composition. Dynamic behavior in networks occurs not only locally but also at the global level, as systems expand or shrink due either to: changes in the size of node population or variations in the chance of a connection between two nodes. Here, we propose a numerical maximum-likelihood method to estimate population size and the probability of two nodes connecting at any given point in time. An advantage of the method is that it relies only on aggregate quantities, which are easy to access and free from privacy issues. Our approach enables us to identify the simultaneous (rather than the asynchronous) contribution of each mechanism in the densification and sparsification of human contacts, providing a better understanding of how humans collectively construct and deconstruct social networks.

Characterization of interactions’ persistence in time-varying networks

“…Finally, the methodology presented in this work has some technical—and conceptual,—limitations which could become the subject of further studies. For instance, one could generalise the estimation of to account for the existence of correlations in the probability that the same edge exists in adjacent snapshots (which is one of the hallmarks of real time-varying networks) 3 , 36 , 37 . Another possibility is to leverage the information carried by the set of each link’s local values of temporality.…”