A research group led by Associate Professor Teruyoshi Kobayashi of the Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University has developed a new method for objectively identifying the degree of stable intimacy in a network that changes over time.It is possible to measure the intimacy of all two-way relationships, such as the business relationship between banks and companies and the sociality of animals, as well as between humans.
According to Kobe University, the research group estimated the potential amount of activity of the pair to be surveyed from the data, and calculated the number of contacts when the partner was randomly selected.After that, the number of times each pair actually contacted was examined, and if the number of times was too large to occur when a partner was randomly selected, the relationship was judged to be intimate.
When this was applied to various dynamic networks that changed over time, many intimate pairs were found in the same class at an elementary school in France, and it was considered to be the purpose of borrowing between Japanese banks during the 2008-2009 Lehman shock. A temporary increase in transactions was found.The correspondence between such an intimate set of pairs and the social community structure could not be detected by existing methods.
By using this method, the research group can objectively grasp the network of friends in the school, take measures against isolated children, and have a two-way relationship such as financial market transactions and livestock herd management. It is said that it can be used in a wide range of fields such as structural analysis of the network formed by.
Paper information:[Nature Communications] The structured backbone of temporal social ties
