The Temporal Rich Club Phenomenon

TL;DR

This paper introduces the 'temporal rich club phenomenon,' a new measure to analyze how highly connected nodes in temporal networks tend to form simultaneous, stable structures, revealing insights into their organization and dynamics.

Contribution

It proposes a novel quantitative measure for the temporal rich club phenomenon and demonstrates its application across various datasets to uncover temporal organizational patterns.

Findings

Reveals the tendency of prominent nodes to form stable, simultaneous structures.

Provides a new perspective on temporal network organization.

Enables analysis of key moments in network evolution.

Abstract

Identifying the hidden organizational principles and relevant structures of networks representing complex physical systems is fundamental to understand their properties. To this aim, uncovering the structures involving a network's prominent nodes in a network is an effective approach. In temporal networks, the simultaneity of connections is crucial for temporally stable structures to arise. We thus propose here a novel measure to quantitatively investigate the tendency of well connected nodes to form simultaneous and stable structures in a temporal network. We refer to this tendency, when observed, as the "temporal rich club phenomenon". We illustrate the interest of this concept by analyzing diverse data sets under this lens, and showing how it enables a new perspective on their temporal patterns, from the role of cohesive structures in relation to processes unfolding on top of the network to the study of specific moments of interest in the evolution of the network.