Going beyond communication intensity for estimating tie strengths in social networks

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that incorporating multiple temporal features from contact time series significantly improves the estimation of social tie strength over simple contact counts, using mobile-phone data.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of temporal contact features and their relation to tie strength, surpassing traditional contact count methods.

Findings

Temporal features outperform contact counts in predicting tie strength.

Multiple features combined yield the best estimation accuracy.

Strong relationship between temporal contact patterns and neighborhood overlap.

Abstract

Even though the concept of tie strength is central in social network analysis, it is difficult to quantify how strong social ties are. One typical way of estimating tie strength in data-driven studies has been to simply count the total number or duration of contacts between two people. This, however, disregards many features that can be extracted from the rich data sets used for social network reconstruction. Here, we focus on contact data with temporal information. We systematically study how features of the contact time series are related to topological features usually associated with tie strength. We analyze a large mobile-phone dataset and measure a number of properties of the call time series for each tie, and use these to predict the so-called neighbourhood overlap, a feature related to strong ties in the sociological literature. We observe a strong relationship between temporal features and the neighbourhood overlap, with many features outperforming simple contact counts. Features that stand out include the number of days with calls, number of bursty cascades, typical times of contacts, and temporal stability. Our results suggest that these measures could be adapted for use in social network construction and indicate that the best results can be achieved by combining multiple temporal features.