The Dynamics of a Mobile Phone Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to analyze mobile phone network dynamics by measuring link persistence, revealing key factors like reciprocity and clustering that influence link longevity.

Contribution

It presents a quantitative indicator of link persistence and demonstrates its effectiveness in predicting tie survival in mobile phone networks.

Findings

Reciprocal links are more persistent.

Low-degree, high-clustering nodes have more persistent links.

Reciprocity is the strongest predictor of link persistence.

Abstract

The empirical study of network dynamics has been limited by the lack of longitudinal data. Here we introduce a quantitative indicator of link persistence to explore the correlations between the structure of a mobile phone network and the persistence of its links. We show that persistent links tend to be reciprocal and are more common for people with low degree and high clustering. We study the redundancy of the associations between persistence, degree, clustering and reciprocity and show that reciprocity is the strongest predictor of tie persistence. The method presented can be easily adapted to characterize the dynamics of other networks and can be used to identify the links that are most likely to survive in the future.