Modeling link formation behaviors in dynamic social networks

Abstract

Online social networks are dynamic in nature. While links between users are seemingly formed and removed randomly, there exists some interested link formation behaviors demonstrated by users performing link creation and removal activities. Uncovering these behaviors not only allows us to gain deep insights of the users, but also pave the way to decipher how social links are formed. In this paper, we propose a general framework to define user link formation behaviors using well studied local link structures (i.e., triads and dyads) in a dynamic social network where links are formed at different timestamps. Depending on the role a user plays in a link structure, we derive different types of link formation behaviors. We develop models for these behaviors and measure them for a set of users in an Epinions dataset. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.