Are the different layers of a social network conveying the same information?

Abstract

Comprehensive and quantitative investigations of social theories and phenomena increasingly benefit from the vast breadth of data describing human social relations, which is now available within the realm of computational social science. Such data are, however, typically proxies for one of the many interaction layers composing social networks, which can be defined in many ways and are typically composed of communication of various types (e.g., phone calls, face-to-face communication, etc.). As a result, many studies focus on one single layer, corresponding to the data at hand. Several studies have, however, shown that these layers are not interchangeable, despite the presence of a certain level of correlations between them. Here, we investigate whether different layers of interactions among individuals lead to similar conclusions with respect to the presence of homophily patterns in a population-homophily represents one of the widest studied phenomenon in social networks. To this aim, we consider a dataset describing interactions and links of various nature in a population of Asian students with diverse nationalities, first language and gender. We study homophily patterns, as well as their temporal evolutions in each layer of the social network. To facilitate our analysis, we put forward a general method to assess whether the homophily patterns observed in one layer inform us about patterns in another layer. For instance, our study reveals that three network layers-cell phone communications, questionnaires about friendship, and trust relations-lead to similar and consistent results despite some minor discrepancies. The homophily patterns of the co-presence network layer, however, does not yield any meaningful information about other network layers.Keywords: social networks; multilayer networks; temporal homophily defined: e.g., friendship relations, patterns of communications, co-presence, face-toface interactions. These different types of relations form a multilayer network [3,4], for which each layer can be explored using possibly different methods. Friendship relations are typically mined through surveys, physical interactions and proximity by diaries or more recently using wearable sensors [5,6], and communication patterns are extracted from mobile phone call records [7][8][9]. In recent times in particular, technological developments have allowed researchers to gather increasing amounts of digital data on face-to-face contacts, phone communication patterns and online relationships, at widely different scales in terms of population size, space and time resolution. These data have been widely used to investigate the structure of social networks, the patterns of social interactions and social theories, such as the strength of weak ties [7], homophily patterns (the tendency of individuals to have social links with similar individuals, with respect to gender, nationality, social class, etc.[10]) [11][12][13][14][15][16], mechanisms of link formation and persistence [11,12,17], social strategies linked to limited ...

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