Understanding actor loyalty to event-based groups in affiliation networks

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a method for analyzing the temporal dynamics of affiliation networks. We define affiliation groups which describe temporally related subsets of actors and describe an approach for exploring changing memberships in these affiliation groups over time. To model the dynamic behavior in these networks, we consider the concept of loyalty and introduce a measure that captures an actor’s loyalty to an affiliation group as the degree of ‘commitment’ an actor shows to the group over time. We evaluate our measure using three real world affiliation networks: a publication network, a senate bill cosponsorship network, and a dolphin network. The results show the utility of our measure for analyzing the dynamic behavior of actors and quantifying their loyalty to different time-varying affiliation groups.