Disassortative mixing in online social networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the mixing patterns of online social networks, revealing a transition from assortative to disassortative mixing in Wealink, and explores how network properties like clustering and modularity relate to these patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a simple network model explaining the transition in degree mixing patterns in online social networks and discusses the relationships among assortativity, clustering, and modularity.

Findings

Wealink transitioned from assortative to disassortative mixing.

A simple network model explains the transition.

Relations among assortativity, clustering, and modularity are analyzed.

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that social networks exhibit an assortative mixing pattern, whereas biological and technological networks show a disassortative mixing pattern. However, the recent research on the online social networks modifies the widespread belief, and many online social networks show a disassortative or neutral mixing feature. Especially, we found that an online social network, Wealink, underwent a transition from degree assortativity characteristic of real social networks to degree disassortativity characteristic of many online social networks, and the transition can be reasonably elucidated by a simple network model that we propose. The relations among network assortativity, clustering, and modularity are also discussed in the paper.