Unfolding accessibility provides a macroscopic approach to temporal networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to analyze temporal networks by unfolding accessibility graphs, revealing path duration distributions and characteristic timescales, and assesses static representations through causal fidelity, demonstrated on social, trade, and contact networks.

Contribution

It generalizes accessibility to temporal networks and proposes unfolding techniques to analyze their dynamic properties and static approximation quality.

Findings

Revealed distribution of shortest path durations in temporal networks

Identified characteristic time-scales relevant to network dynamics

Demonstrated method's applicability on diverse real-world networks

Abstract

An accessibility graph of a network contains a link, wherever there is a path of arbitrary length between two nodes. We generalize the concept of accessibility to temporal networks. Building an accessibility graph by consecutively adding paths of growing length (unfolding), we obtain information about the distribution of shortest path durations and characteristic time-scales in temporal networks. Moreover, we define causal fidelity to measure the goodness of their static representation. The practicability of our proposed methods is demonstrated for three examples: networks of social contacts, livestock trade and sexual contacts.