Community Structure and Its Stability on a Face-to-Face Interaction Network in Kyoto City

TL;DR

This study analyzes the stability of community structures in a face-to-face interaction network in Kyoto, revealing that persistent communities are maintained by equilibrium conditions similar to chemical potentials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach by modeling community stability using concepts from thermodynamics and equilibrium conditions in social interaction networks.

Findings

Chemical potentials of communities match within 10% daily.

Persistent communities are driven by stability in community structure.

Theoretical framework explains community persistence in social networks.

Abstract

As social behavior plays an essential role in people's lives, the features of face-to-face interaction networks must be examined to understand people's social behavior. In this study, we focused on the stable community structure of a face-to-face interaction network because it explains the persistent communities caused by the stationary communication patterns of citizens and visitors in a city. We regarded citizens and visitors as two kinds of particles and the community as a phase and theorized the stability of the community structure using the equilibrium conditions among communities. We formulated the chemical potentials of the communities and examined whether they were in equilibrium under the assumption of a canonical ensemble. We estimated the chemical potentials of persistent communities and found that these values matched within approximately 10% error for each day. This result indicates that the cause of persistent communities is the stability of community structure.