Exploratory study of a new model for evolving networks

Abstract

The study of social networks has gained new importance with the recent rise of large on-line communities. Most current approaches focus on deterministic (descriptive) models and are usually restricted to a preset number of people. Moreover, the dynamic aspect is often treated as an addendum to the static model. Taking inspiration from real-life friendship formation patterns, we propose a new generative model of evolving social networks that allows for birth and death of social links and addition of new people. Each person has a distribution over social interaction spheres, which we term "contexts. " We study the robustness of our model by examining statistical properties of simulated networks relative to well known properties of real social networks. We discuss the shortcomings of this model and problems that arise during learning. Several extensions are proposed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.