Unfolding dynamics in a social network: Co-evolution of link formation and user interaction

Measurement studies of online social networks show that all social links are not equal, and the strength of each link is best characterized by the frequency of interactions between the linked users. To date, few studies have been able to examine detailed interaction data over time, and none have studied the problem of modeling user interactions. This paper proposes a generative model of social interactions that captures the inherently heterogeneous strengths of social links, thus having broad implications on the design of social network algorithms such as friend recommendation, information diffusion and viral marketing.EI