Analysis of a large-scale weighted network of one-to-one human communication

By Jukka-Pekka Onnela, J. Saramaki, Jorkki Hyvonen, Gábor Szabó, Marcio A. de Menezes, Kimmo K. Kaski, Albert-László Barabási, János Kertész. 2007

398 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We construct a connected network of 3.9 million nodes from mobile phone call records, which can be regarded as a proxy for the underlying human communication network at the societal level. We assign two weights on each edge to reflect the strength of social interaction, which are the aggregate call duration and the cumulative number of calls placed between the individuals over a period of 18 weeks. We present a detailed analysis of this weighted network by examining its degree, strength, and weight distributions, as well as its topological assortativity and weighted assortativity, clustering and weighted clustering, together with correlations between these quantities. We give an account of motif intensity and coherence distributions and compare them to a randomized reference system. We also use the concept of link overlap to measure the number of common neighbours any two adjacent nodes have, which serves as a useful local measure for identifying the interconnectedness of communities. We report a positive correlation between the overlap and weight of a link, thus providing strong quantitative evidence for the weak ties hypothesis, a central concept in social network analysis. The percolation properties of the network are found to depend on the type and order of removed links, and they can help understand how the local structure of the network manifests itself at the global level. We hope that our results will contribute to modelling weighted large-scale social networks, and believe that the systematic approach followed here can be adopted to study other weighted networks.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/545f98b3591afb9e08e5b6e3b6b4036bba03c583

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Citations in the corpus

Universal features of correlated bursty behaviour (2011, background): “It is known from earlier studies [4] that the P (s) strength distribution of the MCD is broad with a maximum value smax = 7933 in the present case.”
What's in a crowd? Analysis of face-to-face behavioral networks (2010, background): “On the other hand, the sub-linear dependence observed for large-scale phone call networks (Onnela et al., 2007a) corresponds to the fact thatmoreactiveindividualsspend onaveragelesstimein eachcall.”
Analysis of Game Bot's Behavioral Characteristics in Social Interaction Networks of MMORPG (2015, background): “[ 3] The Bot-Bot group has the link overlaps in six pairwise networks, Party-Friendship, Party-Trade, Party-Whisper, Friendship-Trade, Friendship-Whisper, and Trade-Whisper networks.”
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Comparison of online social relations in volume vs interaction: a case study of cyworld (2008, background): “Previous work on activity networks include phone-call networks [34, 35] and MSN messen-”
Analyzing and modeling real-world phenomena with complex networks: a survey of applications (2007, background): “[88, 89] considered the call graph of a mobile operator, but included only reciprocal calls in the graph, i.”
New Tools for New Research in Psychiatry: A Scalable and Customizable Platform to Empower Data Driven Smartphone Research (2016, neutral): “Mobile phone data, in the format of anonymized call detail records obtained directly from phone operators, have now been used for about a decade to study social and communication networks, communication dynamics, spatial mobility, and more [24-29].”