Quantifying Social Network Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to quantify social network evolution by defining differences between network snapshots using Graph Differential Tuple, enabling analysis of network dynamics and change speed.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to measure social network changes through Graph Differential Tuple and evaluates four distance measures on real data.

Findings

Four new distance measures for network differences

Effective analysis of network change speed

Experimental validation on real social network data

Abstract

The dynamic character of most social networks requires to model evolution of networks in order to enable complex analysis of theirs dynamics. The following paper focuses on the definition of differences between network snapshots by means of Graph Differential Tuple. These differences enable to calculate the diverse distance measures as well as to investigate the speed of changes. Four separate measures are suggested in the paper with experimental study on real social network data.