Karsai, Márton, Perra, Nicola ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5559-3064 and Vespignani, Alessandro (2014) Time varying networks and the weakness of strong ties. Scientific Reports, 4:4001. ISSN 2045-2322 (Print), 2045-2322 (Online) (doi:10.1038/srep04001)

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Abstract

In most social and information systems the activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. The temporal variation in networks' connectivity patterns and the ongoing dynamic processes are usually coupled in ways that still challenge our mathematical or computational modelling. Here we analyse a mobile call dataset and find a simple statistical law that characterize the temporal evolution of users' egocentric networks. We encode this observation in a reinforcement process defining a time-varying network model that exhibits the emergence of strong and weak ties. We study the effect of time-varying and heterogeneous interactions on the classic rumour spreading model in both synthetic, and real-world networks. We observe that strong ties severely inhibit information diffusion by confining the spreading process among agents with recurrent communication patterns. This provides the counterintuitive evidence that strong ties may have a negative role in the spreading of information across networks.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Time-varying networks
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) > Centre for Business Network Analysis (CBNA)
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2020 10:05
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/13895

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