Uncovering the Spatio-Temporal Structure of Social Networks using Cell Phone

LUIS GREGORIO. MOYANO; OSCAR MOLL THOMAE; ENRIQUE MARTINEZ-FRIAS

Berlin

Workshop; CompleNet 2013 - 4th Workshop on Complex Networks; 2013

Freie Universitat Berlin

The connection between human mobility and social networks has gained much attention lately, but research in this area is limited due to lack of adequate data that describes both mobility and social interactions. In this work, we characterize spatio-temporal features of social networks taken from a comprehensive, national-wide dataset of cell phone records. Our results show a non-trivial dependence between social network structure and the spatial distribution of its elements. Moreover, we describe and quantify precisely the probability of parties in a call to be at a given distance. Our results show that this probability is well described by the framework of gravity models, but with different decaying rates at urban and interurban scales. Finally, we discuss how the structural information gained may be used to estimate a class of unknown features of the network.