Evolving Social Networks via Friend Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model for simulating the evolution of social networks, capturing how connections form over time, applicable to online and real-world social structures.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel evolution model for social networks that closely mimics real-life growth patterns and can be applied to various types of social systems.

Findings

Simulated network evolution aligns with real-world social network growth.

Model can be adapted to political and organizational networks.

Provides insights into structural changes over time.

Abstract

A social network grows over a period of time with the formation of new connections and relations. In recent years we have witnessed a massive growth of online social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. So it has become a problem of extreme importance to know the destiny of these networks. Thus predicting the evolution of a social network is a question of extreme importance. A good model for evolution of a social network can help in understanding the properties responsible for the changes occurring in a network structure. In this paper we propose such a model for evolution of social networks. We model the social network as an undirected graph where nodes represent people and edges represent the friendship between them. We define the evolution process as a set of rules which resembles very closely to how a social network grows in real life. We simulate the evolution process and show, how starting from an initial network, a network evolves using this model. We also discuss how our model can be used to model various complex social networks other than online social networks like political networks, various organizations etc..