Title
Statistically validated mobile communication networks: Evolution of motifs in European and Chinese data.
Abstract
Big data open up unprecedented opportunities for investigating complex systems, including society. In particular, communication data serve as major sources for computational social sciences, but they have to be cleaned and filtered as they may contain spurious information due to recording errors as well as interactions, like commercial and marketing activities, not directly related to the social network. The network constructed from communication data can only be considered as a proxy for the network of social relationships. Here we apply a systematic method, based on multiple-hypothesis testing, to statistically validate the links and then construct the corresponding Bonferroni network, generalized to the directed case. We study two large datasets of mobile phone records, one from Europe and the other from China. For both datasets we compare the raw data networks with the corresponding Bonferroni networks and point out significant differences in the structures and in the basic network measures. We show evidence that the Bonferroni network provides a better proxy for the network of social interactions than the original one. Using the filtered networks, we investigated the statistics and temporal evolution of small directed 3-motifs and concluded that closed communication triads have a formation time scale, which is quite fast and typically intraday. We also find that open communication triads preferentially evolve into other open triads with a higher fraction of reciprocated calls. These stylized facts were observed for both datasets.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1088/1367-2630/16/8/083038
NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
complex networks,social systems,statistically validated networks,mobile call records,3-motifs
Dynamic network analysis,Data mining,Social network,Bonferroni correction,Quantum mechanics,Raw data,Complex network,Mobile phone,Big data,Mobile telephony,Physics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
8
1367-2630
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.66
12
Authors
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ming-Xia Li1806.13
Vasyl Palchykov2303.24
Zhi-Qiang Jiang3685.20
kimmo kaski479366.89
János Kertész535723.70
Salvatore Miccichè6234.09
Michele Tumminello7284.81
Wei-Xing Zhou820615.05
Rosario N. Mantegna9344.72