Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks

Abstract

Electronic databases, from phone to e-mails logs, currently provide detailed records of human communication patterns, offering novel avenues to map and explore the structure of social and communication networks. Here we examine the communication patterns of millions of mobile phone users, allowing us to simultaneously study the local and the global structure of a society-wide communication network. We observe a coupling between interaction strengths and the network's local structure, with the counterintuitive consequence that social networks are robust to the removal of the strong ties but fall apart after a phase transition if the weak ties are removed. We show that this coupling significantly slows the diffusion process, resulting in dynamic trapping of information in communities and find that, when it comes to information diffusion, weak and strong ties are both simultaneously ineffective.complex systems ͉ complex networks ͉ diffusion and spreading ͉ phase transition ͉ social systems U ncovering the structure and function of communication networks has always been constrained by the practical difficulty of mapping out interactions among a large number of individuals. Indeed, most of our current understanding of communication and social networks is based on questionnaire data, reaching typically a few dozen individuals and relying on the individual's opinion to reveal the nature and the strength of the ties. The fact that currently an increasing fraction of human interactions are recorded, from e-mail (1-3) to phone records (4), offers unprecedented opportunities to uncover and explore the large scale characteristics of communication and social networks (5). Here we take a first step in this direction by exploiting the widespread use of mobile phones to construct a map of a society-wide communication network, capturing the mobile interaction patterns of millions of individuals. The data set allows us to explore the relationship between the topology of the network and the tie strengths between individuals, information that was inaccessible at the societal level before. We demonstrate a local coupling between tie strengths and network topology, and show that this coupling has important consequences for the network's global stability if ties are removed, as well as for the spread of news and ideas within the network.A significant portion of a country's communication network was reconstructed from 18 weeks of all mobile phone call records among Ϸ20% of the country's entire population, 90% of whose inhabitants had a mobile phone subscription [see supporting information (SI) Appendix]. Whereas a single call between two individuals during 18 weeks may not carry much information, reciprocal calls of long duration between two users serves as a signature of some work-, family-, leisure-, or service-based relationship. Therefore, to translate the phone log data into a network representation that captures the characteristics of the underlying communication network, we connected two users with an undirected link if there ha...

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