Community dynamics in social networks

Gergely Palla, Albert László Barabási, Tamás Vicsek

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

We study the statistical properties of community dynamics in large social networks, where the evolving communities are obtained from subsequent snapshots of the modular structure. Such cohesive groups of people can grow by recruiting new members, or contract by loosing members; two (or more) groups may merge into a single community, while a large enough social group can split into several smaller ones; new communities are born and old ones may disappear. We find significant difference between the behavior of smaller collaborative or friendship circles and larger communities, eg. institutions. Social groups containing only a few members persist longer on average when the fluctuations of the members is small. In contrast, we find that the condition for stability for large communities is continuous changes in their membership, allowing for the possibility that after some time practically all members are exchanged.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)L273-L287
JournalFluctuation and Noise Letters
Volume7
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2007
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Communities
  • Community dynamics
  • Social networks
  • Time evolution

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