Evolutionary of online social networks driven by pareto wealth distribution and bidirectional preferential attachment

Understanding of the evolutionary mechanism of online social networks is greatly significant for the development of network science, but up to now most present researches on this topic have not enough insight. In this study, firstly we empirically showed the essential evolution characteristics of Renren online social network. The evolution mechanism of online social networks is explained by the perspective of Pareto wealth distribution and bidirectional preferential attachment. Then a novel model is proposed to reproduce the evolution characteristics which are consistent with the ones of Renren online social network, and the evolutionary analytical solution to the proposed model was presented. The results suggest that both Pareto wealth distribution and bidirectional preferential attachment play an important role in the evolution process of online social networks and can help us to understand the evolutionary origin of online social networks. The model has significant implications for dynamic simulation researches of social networks, especially in information diffusion through online communities and infection spreading in real societies.