Recency-based preferential attachment models

TL;DR

This paper introduces recency-based preferential attachment models that incorporate the age of vertices, extending traditional models to better reflect real-world network properties like recency effects.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new class of recency-based models that generalize fitness models by including age as a factor in attachment probabilities.

Findings

Some quality distributions lead to power-law degree distributions

Recency factor influences the connectivity patterns of vertices

Models better capture real-world network recency properties

Abstract

Preferential attachment models were shown to be very effective in predicting such important properties of real-world networks as the power-law degree distribution, small diameter, etc. Many different models are based on the idea of preferential attachment: LCD, Buckley-Osthus, Holme-Kim, fitness, random Apollonian network, and many others. Although preferential attachment models reflect some important properties of real-world networks, they do not allow to model the so-called recency property. Recency property reflects the fact that in many real networks vertices tend to connect to other vertices of similar age. This fact motivated us to introduce a new class of models - recency-based models. This class is a generalization of fitness models, which were suggested by Bianconi and Barabasi. Bianconi and Barabasi extended preferential attachment models with pages' inherent quality or fitness of vertices. When a new vertex is added to the graph, it is joined to some already existing vertices that are chosen with probabilities proportional to the product of their fitness and incoming degree. We generalize fitness models by adding a recency factor to the attractiveness function. This means that pages are gaining incoming links according to their attractiveness, which is determined by the incoming degree of the page (current popularity), its inherent quality (some page-specific constant) and age (new pages are gaining new links more rapidly). We analyze different properties of recency-based models. In particular, we show that some distributions of inherent quality lead to the power-law degree distribution.