A nontrivial interplay between triadic closure, preferential, and anti-preferential attachment: New insights from online data
This paper presents an analysis of a temporal network that describes the social connections of a large-scale (∼30,000) sample of online social network users, inhabitants of a fixed city. We tested how the main network formation determinants-transitivity, preferential attachment, and social selection...
| Published in: | Online social networks and media Vol. 34/35. P. 100248 (1-25) |
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| Other Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://vital.lib.tsu.ru/vital/access/manager/Repository/koha:001016961 Перейти в каталог НБ ТГУ |
| Summary: | This paper presents an analysis of a temporal network that describes the social connections of a large-scale (∼30,000) sample of online social network users, inhabitants of a fixed city. We tested how the main network formation determinants-transitivity, preferential attachment, and social selection-contribute to network evolution. We obtained that tie appearing and tie removing events are governed by different combinations of mechanisms: whereas the structure of the network is responsible for the formation of new ties, nodal nonstructural characteristics "decide" whether a tie will continue to exist. Next, our findings show that only one network formation mechanism, gender selectivity, has a significant impact on both tie appearing and tie removing processes. What is interesting, the effect of gender selectivity is most notable for low-degree vertices. Besides this, our analysis revealed that opinion selectivity appears to be a noticeable (but not very important) factor only in the case of tie removing, whereas its contribution to tie appearing is elusive. Our findings suggest that nodes' activity is a crucial factor of network evolution-the majority of tie removing events can be explained by the age-based activity mechanism. Finally, we report that transitivity and preferential attachment do govern network evolution. However, there are two important details: (i) their zone of influence is restricted primarily by tie appearing and (ii) the preferential attachment mechanism is replaced by the anti-preferential attachment rule if the number of common peers is greater than zero. |
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| Bibliography: | Библиогр.: 52 назв. |
| ISSN: | 2468-6964 |