Centrality prediction in dynamic human contact networks

Real technological, social and biological networks evolve over time. Predicting their future topology has applications to epidemiology, targeted marketing, network reliability and routing in ad hoc and peer-to-peer networks. The key problem for such applications is usually to identify the nodes that will be in more important positions in the future. Previous researchers had used ad hoc prediction functions. In this paper, we evaluate ways of predicting a node’s future importance under three important metrics, namely degree, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality, using empirical data on human contact networks collected using mobile devices. We find that node importance is highly predictable due to both periodic and legacy effects of human social behaviour, and we design reasonable prediction functions. However human behaviour is not the same in all circumstances: the centrality of students at Cambridge is best correlated both daily and hourly, no doubt due to hourly lecture schedules, while academics at conferences exhibit rather flat closeness centrality, no doubt because conference attendees are generally trying to speak to new people at each break. This highlights the utility of having a number of different metrics for centrality in dynamic networks, so as to identify typical patterns and predict behaviour. We show that the best-performing prediction functions are 25% more accurate on average than simply using the previous centrality value. These prediction functions can be efficiently computed in linear time, and are thus practical for processing dynamic networks in real-time.