Using cohesive subgroups for analyzing the evolution of the friend view mobile social network

Abstract

The mobility of users and the ubiquity of the mobile phone and Internet are leading to the development of mobile social networks. Much work has been done on modeling the evolution of online social networks using mathematical, social network analysis, and graph theoretic methods, however few using cohesive subgroups and similarity. In this paper, we present a study of the evolution of the Nokia Friend View mobile social network using network and usage statistics, and use the DISSECT method [7] for characterizing this evolution through the movement of cohesive subgroups. We discover that the friend network becomes less dense and less clustered (with fewer subgroups) over time, and the DISSECT method [7] helped to identify these cohesive subgroups and accurately predicted its most active users. We visualized these cohesive subgroups and modeled the evolution using persistence of subgroups. These results point the way towards an analytical framework for comparing mobile social networks which may help facilitate development of new recommender applications. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.