Explaining social events through community evolution on temporal networks

Abstract The social network is closely related to people’s lives. And social events are the products of the human subjective initiative during the evolution of networks. Therefore, there is a close correlation between social events and network evolution. This paper studies the characteristics of network evolution corresponding to social events from the perspective of temporal networks. The change point detection method is applied to capture the “shocks” of social events on the network structure. Then, the patterns of structural changes are analyzed based on the theory of community evolution. Experiments on two cases illustrate that social events are significant milestones to promote the development of social networks. And the mesostructure is the intermediary connecting evolving network and social events.