title: A comparative analysis of the statistical properties of large mobile phone calling networks.
abstract: Mobile phone calling is one of the most widely used communication methods in modern society. The records of calls among mobile phone users provide us a valuable proxy for the understanding of human communication patterns embedded in social networks. Mobile phone users call each other forming a directed calling network. If only reciprocal calls are considered, we obtain an undirected mutual calling network. The preferential communication behavior between two connected users can be statistically tested and it results in two Bonferroni networks with statistically validated edges. We perform a comparative analysis of the statistical properties of these four networks, which are constructed from the calling records of more than nine million individuals in Shanghai over a period of 110 days. We find that these networks share many common structural properties and also exhibit idiosyncratic features when compared with previously studied large mobile calling networks. The empirical findings provide us an intriguing picture of a representative large social network that might shed new lights on the modelling of large social networks.
authors.affiliation: School of Business, School of Science, and Research Center for Econophysics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors.forename: Ming-Xia
authors.initials: MX
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Business, School of Science, and Research Center for Econophysics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors.forename: Zhi-Qiang
authors.initials: ZQ
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: School of Business, School of Science, and Research Center for Econophysics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors.forename: Wen-Jie
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Edificio 18, I-90128 Palermo, Italia.
authors.forename: Salvatore
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Miccichè
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Aziendali e Statistiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Edificio 13, I-90128 Palermo, Italia.
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tumminello
authors.affiliation: School of Business, School of Science, and Research Center for Econophysics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors.forename: Wei-Xing
authors.initials: WX
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: 1] Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Edificio 18, I-90128 Palermo, Italia [2] Center for Network Science and Department of Economics, Central European University, Nador utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Rosario N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Mantegna
mesh_terms: D040421:Cell Phone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D002681:China; D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D060756:Social Networking