Fundamental structures of dynamic social networks

Social systems are in a constant state of flux with dynamics spanning from minute-by-minute changes to patterns present on the timescale of years. Accurate models of social dynamics are important for understanding spreading of influence or diseases, formation of friendships, and the productivity of teams. While there has been much progress on understanding complex networks over the past decade, little is known about the regularities governing the micro-dynamics of social networks. Here we explore the dynamic social network of a densely-connected population of approximately 1000 individuals and their interactions in the network of real-world person-to-person proximity measured via Bluetooth, as well as their telecommunication networks, online social media contacts, geo-location, and demographic data. These high-resolution data allow us to observe social groups directly, rendering community detection unnecessary. Starting from 5-minute time slices we uncover dynamic social structures expressed on multiple timescales. On the hourly timescale, we find that gatherings are fluid, with members coming and going, but organized via a stable core of individuals. Each core represents a social context. Cores exhibit a pattern of recurring meetings across weeks and months, each with varying degrees of regularity. Taken together, these findings provide a powerful simplification of the social network, where cores represent fundamental structures expressed with strong temporal and spatial regularity. Using this framework, we explore the complex interplay between social and geospatial behavior, documenting how the formation of cores are preceded by coordination behavior in the communication networks, and demonstrating that social behavior can be predicted with high precision.Comment: Main Manuscript: 16 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information: 39 pages, 34 figure

Correlations Between Human Mobility and Social Interaction Reveal General Activity Patterns

A day in the life of a person involves a broad range of activities which are common across many people. Going beyond diurnal cycles, a central question is: to what extent do individuals act according to patterns shared across an entire population? Here we investigate the interplay between different activity types, namely communication, motion, and physical proximity by analyzing data collected from smartphones distributed among 638 individuals. We explore two central questions: Which underlying principles govern the formation of the activity patterns? Are the patterns specific to each individual or shared across the entire population? We find that statistics of the entire population allows us to successfully predict 71\% of the activity and 85\% of the inactivity involved in communication, mobility, and physical proximity. Surprisingly, individual level statistics only result in marginally better predictions, indicating that a majority of activity patterns are shared across {our sample population}. Finally, we predict short-term activity patterns using a generalized linear model, which suggests that a simple linear description might be sufficient to explain a wide range of actions, whether they be of social or of physical character

Constrained information flows in temporal networks reveal intermittent communities

Many real-world networks represent dynamic systems with interactions that change over time, often in uncoordinated ways and at irregular intervals. For example, university students connect in intermittent groups that repeatedly form and dissolve based on multiple factors, including their lectures, interests, and friends. Such dynamic systems can be represented as multilayer networks where each layer represents a snapshot of the temporal network. In this representation, it is crucial that the links between layers accurately capture real dependencies between those layers. Often, however, these dependencies are unknown. Therefore, current methods connect layers based on simplistic assumptions that do not capture node-level layer dependencies. For example, connecting every node to itself in other layers with the same weight can wipe out dependencies between intermittent groups, making it difficult or even impossible to identify them. In this paper, we present a principled approach to estimating node-level layer dependencies based on the network structure within each layer. We implement our node-level coupling method in the community detection framework Infomap and demonstrate its performance compared to current methods on synthetic and real temporal networks. We show that our approach more effectively constrains information inside multilayer communities so that Infomap can better recover planted groups in multilayer benchmark networks that represent multiple modes with different groups and better identify intermittent communities in real temporal contact networks. These results suggest that node-level layer coupling can improve the modeling of information spreading in temporal networks and better capture intermittent community structure.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, published in PR

The Role of Gender in Social Network Organization

The digital traces we leave behind when engaging with the modern world offer an interesting lens through which we study behavioral patterns as expression of gender. Although gender differentiation has been observed in a number of settings, the majority of studies focus on a single data stream in isolation. Here we use a dataset of high resolution data collected using mobile phones, as well as detailed questionnaires, to study gender differences in a large cohort. We consider mobility behavior and individual personality traits among a group of more than $800$ university students. We also investigate interactions among them expressed via person-to-person contacts, interactions on online social networks, and telecommunication. Thus, we are able to study the differences between male and female behavior captured through a multitude of channels for a single cohort. We find that while the two genders are similar in a number of aspects, there are robust deviations that include multiple facets of social interactions, suggesting the existence of inherent behavioral differences. Finally, we quantify how aspects of an individual's characteristics and social behavior reveals their gender by posing it as a classification problem. We ask: How well can we distinguish between male and female study participants based on behavior alone? Which behavioral features are most predictive