Transition analysis of boundary-based active configurations in temporal simplicial complexes for ingredient co-occurrences in recipe streams

Abstract

Aiming at knowledge discovery for temporal sequences of cooking recipes published in social media platforms from the viewpoint of network science, we consider an analysis of temporal higher-order networks of ingredients derived from such recipe streams by focusing on the framework of simplicial complex. Previous work found interesting properties of temporal simplicial complexes for the human proximity interactions in five different social settings by examining the configuration transitions before and after triplet interaction events corresponding to 2-simplices. In this paper, as an effective extension of the previous work to the case of higher dimensional n-simplices corresponding to newly published recipes, we propose a novel method of configuration transition analysis by incorporating the following two features. First, to focus on changes in the topological structure of temporal simplicial complex, we incorporate analyzing the transitions of boundary-based configurations. Next, to focus on the temporal heterogeneity in usage activities of ingredients, we incorporate analyzing the transitions of active configurations by introducing the activity degree of configuration. Using real data of a Japanese recipe sharing site, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and reveal some characteristics of the temporal evolution of Japanese homemade recipes published in social media from the perspective of ingredient co-occurrences.