Close relationships: A study of mobile communication records

TL;DR

This study analyzes mobile communication data to understand social relationship structures, revealing how filtering based on communication patterns clarifies the identification of close friends and strengthens observed social preferences.

Contribution

Introduces a control parameter to filter communication data, improving the identification of close relationships and confirming previous findings on social preferences in mobile communication.

Findings

Filtering data with the control parameter enhances the clarity of close relationship identification.

Decreasing the parameter strengthens observed age and gender preferences.

The method confirms the dependence of communication intensity on social tie strength.

Abstract

Mobile phone communication as digital service generates ever-increasing datasets of human communication actions, which in turn allow us to investigate the structure and evolution of social interactions and their networks. These datasets can be used to study the structuring of such egocentric networks with respect to the strength of the relationships by assuming direct dependence of the communication intensity on the strength of the social tie. Recently we have discovered that there are significant differences between the first and further "best friends" from the point of view of age and gender preferences. Here we introduce a control parameter $p_{\rm max}$ based on the statistics of communication with the first and second "best friend" and use it to filter the data. We find that when $p_{\rm max}$ is decreased the identification of the "best friend" becomes less ambiguous and the earlier observed effects get stronger, thus corroborating them.