Correlations of consumption patterns in social-economic networks

TL;DR

This study investigates how consumption patterns are linked to socioeconomic status within social networks, revealing stratification and community structures in purchasing habits using mobile and banking data.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of social and economic data to uncover correlations between social structure, socioeconomic classes, and consumption behaviors.

Findings

Consumption patterns are strongly linked to socioeconomic classes.

A correlation network of merchant categories reveals meaningful community structures.

Purchasing habits show significant multivariate correlations.

Abstract

We analyze a coupled anonymized dataset collecting the mobile phone communication and bank transactions history of a large number of individuals. After mapping the social structure and introducing indicators of socioeconomic status, demographic features, and purchasing habits of individuals we show that typical consumption patterns are strongly correlated with identified socioeconomic classes leading to patterns of stratification in the social structure. In addition we measure correlations between merchant categories and introduce a correlation network, which emerges with a meaningful community structure. We detect multivariate relations between merchant categories and show correlations in purchasing habits of individuals. Our work provides novel and detailed insight into the relations between social and consuming behaviour with potential applications in recommendation system design.