Topological evolution of virtual social networks by modeling social activities

With the development of Internet and wireless communication, virtual social networks are becoming increasingly important in the formation of nowadays' social communities. Topological evolution model is foundational and critical for social network related researches. Up to present most of the related research experiments are carried out on artificial networks, however, a study of incorporating the actual social activities into the network topology model is ignored. This paper first formalizes two mathematical abstract concepts of hobbies search and friend recommendation to model the social actions people exhibit. Then a social activities based topology evolution simulation model is developed to satisfy some well-known properties that have been discovered in real-world social networks. Empirical results show that the proposed topology evolution model has embraced several key network topological properties of concern, which can be envisioned as signatures of real social networks.