Role of Temporal Diversity in Inferring Social Ties Based on Spatio-Temporal Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new spatio-temporal dataset and demonstrates that Temporal Diversity significantly improves the inference of social tie strength from location data, revealing insights into student interactions within a university campus.

Contribution

The study presents DSSN, a detailed location dataset, and introduces Temporal Diversity as a novel metric that enhances social relationship inference from spatiotemporal data.

Findings

Temporal Diversity outperforms other metrics in predicting relationship strength.

Bounded geographical areas like university campuses provide valuable microcosms for social interaction studies.

Evolving Temporal Diversity offers insights into dynamic social relationships over time.

Abstract

The last two decades have seen a tremendous surge in research on social networks and their implications. The studies includes inferring social relationships, which in turn have been used for target advertising, recommendations, search customization etc. However, the offline experiences of human, the conversations with people and face-to-face interactions that govern our lives interactions have received lesser attention. We introduce DAIICT Spatio-Temporal Network (DSSN), a spatiotemporal dataset of 0.7 million data points of continuous location data logged at an interval of every 2 minutes by mobile phones of 46 subjects. Our research is focused at inferring relationship strength between students based on the spatiotemporal data and comparing the results with the self-reported data. In that pursuit we introduce Temporal Diversity, which we show to be superior in its contribution to predicting relationship strength than its counterparts. We also explore the evolving nature of Temporal Diversity with time. Our rich dataset opens various other avenues of research that require fine-grained location data with bounded movement of participants within a limited geographical area. The advantage of having a bounded geographical area such as a university campus is that it provides us with a microcosm of the real world, where each such geographic zone has an internal context and function and a high percentage of mobility is governed by schedules and time-tables. The bounded geographical region in addition to the age homogeneous population gives us a minute look into the active internal socialization of students in a university.