social distances or 'what lies beneath preferential attachment'

Christophe Prieur (1) , Giambattista Salinari (2)

1 LIAFA - Laboratoire d'informatique Algorithmique : Fondements et Applications
2 Dipartimento di Studi Storici e Geografici

This paper addresses the issue of the power-law degree distribution observed in large networks and its usual justification by way of a dynamics based on preferential attachment, applied here to an example of network (about professional changes in the XIXth-century France). The comparison of this dynamics with the one of other phenomena having the same kind of distributions (family names and cities populations), puts into evidence a phenomenon of measurable social distances which is hidden by the preferential attachment and the degree distribution, and is much more meaningfull in this particular case.

Mots clés: complex networks; preferential attachment; social networks; network dynamics

Domaines: Mathématique discrète [cs.DM]

Christophe Prieur, Giambattista Salinari. social distances or 'what lies beneath preferential attachment'. 2006. ⟨hal-00020060⟩