Review and Assessment of Digital Twin--Oriented Social Network Simulators

TL;DR

This paper reviews and assesses social network simulators within a Digital Twin framework, extending a promising simulator to generate networks of varying complexity and proposing a similarity assessment method.

Contribution

It provides a critical review of existing SNSs, extends a leading simulator for varied complexity, and introduces a new similarity assessment approach within a Digital Twin context.

Findings

Extended a social network simulator for varied structural complexity.

Proposed a composite index for real vs. simulated network similarity.

Illustrated the approach using the Karate Club network.

Abstract

The ability to faithfully represent real social networks is critical from the perspective of testing various what-if scenarios which are not feasible to be implemented in a real system as the system's state would be irreversibly changed. High fidelity simulators allow one to investigate the consequences of different actions before introducing them to the real system. For example, in the context of social systems, an accurate social network simulator can be a powerful tool used to guide policy makers, help companies plan their advertising campaigns or authorities to analyse fake news spread. In this study we explore different Social Network Simulators (SNSs) and assess to what extent they are able to mimic the real social networks. We conduct a critical review and assessment of existing Social Network Simulators under the Digital Twin-Oriented Modelling framework proposed in our previous study. We subsequently extend one of the most promising simulators from the evaluated ones, to facilitate generation of social networks of varied structural complexity levels. This extension brings us one step closer to a Digital Twin Oriented SNS (DT Oriented SNS). We also propose an approach to assess the similarity between real and simulated networks with the composite performance indexes based on both global and local structural measures, while taking runtime of the simulator as an indicator of its efficiency. We illustrate various characteristics of the proposed DT Oriented SNS using a well known Karate Club network as an example. While not considered to be of sufficient complexity, the simulator is intended as one of the first steps on a journey towards building a Digital Twin of a social network that perfectly mimics the reality.