The Competition of Homophily and Popularity in Growing and Evolving Social Networks

Abstract

Previous studies have used several models to investigate the mechanisms for growing and evolving real social networks. These models have been widely used to simulate large networks in many applications. In this paper, based on the evolutionary mechanisms of homophily and popularity, we propose a new generation model for growing and evolving social networks, namely, the Homophily-Popularity model. In this new model, new links are added, and old links are deleted based on the link probabilities between every node pair. The results of our simulation-based experimental studies provide evidence that the proposed model is capable of modelling a variety of real social networks.