title: Time varying networks and the weakness of strong ties.
abstract: In most social and information systems the activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. The temporal variation in networks' connectivity patterns and the ongoing dynamic processes are usually coupled in ways that still challenge our mathematical or computational modelling. Here we analyse a mobile call dataset and find a simple statistical law that characterize the temporal evolution of users' egocentric networks. We encode this observation in a reinforcement process defining a time-varying network model that exhibits the emergence of strong and weak ties. We study the effect of time-varying and heterogeneous interactions on the classic rumour spreading model in both synthetic, and real-world networks. We observe that strong ties severely inhibit information diffusion by confining the spreading process among agents with recurrent communication patterns. This provides the counterintuitive evidence that strong ties may have a negative role in the spreading of information across networks.
authors: 1] Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, Northeastern University, Boston MA 02115 USA [2] Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076.
authors: Márton
authors: M
authors: Karsai
authors: Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, Northeastern University, Boston MA 02115 USA.
authors: Nicola
authors: N
authors: Perra
authors: 1] Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, Northeastern University, Boston MA 02115 USA [2] Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Turin 10133, Italy [3] Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138.
authors: Alessandro
authors: A
authors: Vespignani
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D040421:Cell Phone; D019058:Community Networks; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D060756:Social Networking