When Will I See you Again: Modelling the Influence of Social Networks on Social Activities

Social activities account for a large amount of travel, yet due to their irregularity and the number of options regarding location, participants, and timing, they are difficult to model and predict. We assume that social activities are constrained by one’s social network, which consists of people you are close to, both socially and spatially. Therefore, a model of social activity behaviour should be sensitive to the network. In this paper, an agent-based model to describe social activities between two people over time is described and four different input networks (random, based on spatial distance, based on social distance, based on both distances) are experimented with. The results show that the overall social network has an effect on the number of activities generated in the entire system and also between pairs of friends.

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