Social network dynamics of face-to-face interactions

TLDR

Recent data on social networks reveal that social ties arise from aggregated interactions and that face‑to‑face encounters are bursty with highly heterogeneous durations. The study introduces a short‑time‑scale model for face‑to‑face interactions in conference‑like settings, aiming to capture group dynamics and to serve as a flexible framework for exploring social network processes. The model incorporates short‑time‑scale interactions, group contexts, agent heterogeneity, and dynamic local population changes. Analytical and numerical analysis demonstrates that the model reproduces key empirical features of face‑to‑face interaction data.

Abstract

The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our understanding of the "microscopic structure" of a social tie. A social tie indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as face-to-face conversations or phone-calls. Analysis of data on face-to-face interactions shows that such events, as many other human activities, are bursty, with very heterogeneous durations. In this paper we present a model for social interactions at short time scales, aimed at describing contexts such as conference venues in which individuals interact in small groups. We present a detailed anayltical and numerical study of the model's dynamical properties, and show that it reproduces important features of empirical data. The model allows for many generalizations toward an increasingly realistic description of social interactions. In particular in this paper we investigate the case where the agents have intrinsic heterogeneities in their social behavior, or where dynamic variations of the local number of individuals are included. Finally we propose this model as a very flexible framework to investigate how dynamical processes unfold in social networks.