Temporal motifs reveal homophily, gender-specific patterns and group talk in mobile communication networks

TL;DR

This study uses mobile phone data and temporal motifs to uncover complex, gender-specific, and homophilic interaction patterns that go beyond simple network analysis, revealing new insights into human communication dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a method applying temporal motifs to attribute-rich mobile communication data, revealing novel gender and density-related interaction patterns independent of interaction frequency.

Findings

Gender differences in communication patterns

Existence of temporal homophily beyond network structure

Distinct temporal patterns in dense versus sparse network regions

Abstract

Electronic communication records provide detailed information about temporal aspects of human interaction. Previous studies have shown that individuals' communication patterns have complex temporal structure, and that this structure has system-wide effects. In this paper we use mobile phone records to show that interaction patterns involving multiple individuals have non-trivial temporal structure that cannot be deduced from a network presentation where only interaction frequencies are taken into account. We apply a recently introduced method, temporal motifs, to identify interaction patterns in a temporal network where nodes have additional attributes such as gender and age. We then develop a null model that allows identifying differences between various types of nodes so that these differences are independent of the network based on interaction frequencies. We find gender-related differences in communication patters, and show the existence of temporal homophily, the tendency of similar individuals to participate in interaction patterns beyond what would be expected on the basis of the network structure alone. We also show that temporal patterns differ between dense and sparse parts of the network. Because this result is independent of edge weights, it can be considered as an extension of Granovetter's hypothesis to temporal networks.