A Generalized Notion of Time for Modeling Temporal Networks

Abstract

Most approaches for modeling and analyzing temporal networks do not explicitly discuss the underlying notion of time. In this paper, we therefore introduce a generalized notion of time for temporal networks. Our approach also allows for considering non-deterministic time and incomplete data, two issues that are often found when analyzing data-sets extracted from online social networks, for example. In order to demonstrate the consequences of our generalized notion of time, we also discuss the implications for the computation of (shortest) temporal paths in temporal networks.