Event-driven modelling of evolving social networks

Abstract

In many social networks, the connections between actors are formed because they participate in the same event, such as a set of scholars co-authoring a paper or colleagues having a teleconference. Therefore, we propose an event-driven model to capture the growth dynamics of social networks through modelling of the social events. We also investigate the evolution of event formation and the joint effect of attachedness and locality on the selection of participants for events in real social networks. We incorporate the evolution of event formation and the joint effect of attachedness and locality into our model. The experimental results suggest that our approach can simulate important network structures, such as hierarchical communities and assortativity, and better characterise the growing process of real networks than non-event driven models.