Title: Event-driven modelling of evolving social networks

Authors: Baojun Qiu; Kristinka Ivanova; John Yen; Peng Liu; Frank E. Ritter

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Abstract: In many social networks, the connections between actors are formed because they participate in the same event, such as a set of scholars co-authoring a paper or colleagues having a teleconference. Therefore, we propose an event-driven model to capture the growth dynamics of social networks through modelling of the social events. We also investigate the evolution of event formation and the joint effect of attachedness and locality on the selection of participants for events in real social networks. We incorporate the evolution of event formation and the joint effect of attachedness and locality into our model. The experimental results suggest that our approach can simulate important network structures, such as hierarchical communities and assortativity, and better characterise the growing process of real networks than non-event driven models.

Keywords: social network analysis; social network modelling; behaviour evolution; event-driven modelling; simulation; collaborative networks; power-law degree distributions; clustering coefficients; assortative mixing; social networking; social events; event formation; hierarchical communities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSCCPS.2011.043602

International Journal of Social Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems, 2011 Vol.1 No.1, pp.13 - 32

Published online: 21 Feb 2015 *