The emergence and role of strong ties in time-varying communication networks

In most social, information, and collaboration systems the complex activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. Temporal changes in the network structure and the dynamical processes occurring on its fabric are usually coupled in ways that still challenge our mathematical or computational modelling. Here we analyse a mobile call dataset describing the activity of millions of individuals and investigate the temporal evolution of their egocentric networks. We empirically observe a simple statistical law characterizing the memory of agents that quantitatively signals how much interactions are more likely to happen again on already established connections. We encode the observed dynamics in a reinforcement process defining a generative computational network model with time-varying connectivity patterns. This activity-driven network model spontaneously generates the basic dynamic process for the differentiation between strong and weak ties. The model is used to study the effect of time-varying heterogeneous interactions on the spreading of information on social networks. We observe that the presence of strong ties may severely inhibit the large scale spreading of information by confining the process among agents with recurrent communication patterns. Our results provide the counterintuitive evidence that strong ties may have a negative role in the spreading of information across networks. keywords: Network models, Data science, Information diffusion