Understanding co-evolution in large multi-relational social networks, CoRR abs/1407.2883

Abstract—Understanding dynamics of evolution in large social networks is an important problem. In this paper, we charac-terize evolution in large multi-relational social networks. The proliferation of online media such as Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and MMORPGs1 have created social networking data at an unprecedented scale. Sony’s Everquest 2 is one such example. We used game multi-relational networks to reveal the dynamics of evolution in a multi-relational setting by macroscopic study of the game network. Macroscopic analysis involves fragmenting the network into smaller portions for studying the dynamics within these sub-networks, referred to as ‘communities’. From an evolutionary perspective of multi-relational network analysis, we have made the following contributions. Specifically, we formulated and analyzed various metrics to capture evolutionary properties of networks. We find that co-evolution rates in trust based ‘com-munities ’ are approximately 60 % higher than the trade based ‘communities’. We also find that the trust and trade connections within the ‘communities ’ reduce as their size increases. Finally, we study the interrelation between the dynamics of trade and trust within ‘communities ’ and find interesting results about the precursor relationship between the trade and the trust dynamics within the ‘communities’. Keywords—Evolution, communities, co-evolution, multi-relational network, trust dynamics, influence dynamics I