Understanding Co-evolution in Large Multi-relational Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the evolution of large multi-relational social networks, specifically in online gaming environments, by analyzing trust and trade relationships within communities to understand their co-evolution dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces metrics for analyzing multi-relational network evolution and reveals differences in co-evolution rates and interrelations between trust and trade within communities.

Findings

Trust-based communities have higher co-evolution rates than trade-based ones.

Community size negatively correlates with trust and trade connection density.

Trade dynamics often precede trust dynamics within communities.

Abstract

Understanding dynamics of evolution in large social networks is an important problem. In this paper, we characterize evolution in large multi-relational social networks. The proliferation of online media such as Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and MMORPGs\footnote{Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games} have created social networking data at an unprecedented scale. Sony's Everquest 2 is one such example. We used game multi-relational networks to reveal the dynamics of evolution in a multi-relational setting by macroscopic study of the game network. Macroscopic analysis involves fragmenting the network into smaller portions for studying the dynamics within these sub-networks, referred to as `communities'. From an evolutionary perspective of multi-relational network analysis, we have made the following contributions. Specifically, we formulated and analyzed various metrics to capture evolutionary properties of networks. We find that co-evolution rates in trust based `communities' are approximately $60\%$ higher than the trade based `communities'. We also find that the trust and trade connections within the `communities' reduce as their size increases. Finally, we study the interrelation between the dynamics of trade and trust within `communities' and find interesting results about the precursor relationship between the trade and the trust dynamics within the `communities'.