作者
Stefano Guarino, Enrico Mastrostefano, Massimo Bernaschi, Alessandro Celestini, Marco Cianfriglia, Davide Torre, Lena Rebecca Zastrow
发表日期
2021/4/26
期刊
Future Internet
卷号
13
期号
5
页码范围
108
出版商
MDPI
简介
The definition of suitable generative models for synthetic yet realistic social networks is a widely studied problem in the literature. By not being tied to any real data, random graph models cannot capture all the subtleties of real networks and are inadequate for many practical contexts—including areas of research, such as computational epidemiology, which are recently high on the agenda. At the same time, the so-called contact networks describe interactions, rather than relationships, and are strongly dependent on the application and on the size and quality of the sample data used to infer them. To fill the gap between these two approaches, we present a data-driven model for urban social networks, implemented and released as open source software. By using just widely available aggregated demographic and social-mixing data, we are able to create, for a territory of interest, an age-stratified and geo-referenced synthetic population whose individuals are connected by “strong ties” of two types: intra-household (e.g., kinship) or friendship. While household links are entirely data-driven, we propose a parametric probabilistic model for friendship, based on the assumption that distances and age differences play a role, and that not all individuals are equally sociable. The demographic and geographic factors governing the structure of the obtained network, under different configurations, are thoroughly studied through extensive simulations focused on three Italian cities of different size.
引用总数
20212022202320244422
学术搜索中的文章
S Guarino, E Mastrostefano, M Bernaschi, A Celestini… - Future Internet, 2021