Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Role Of Social Ties In Dynamic Networks, Xiang Zuo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social networks are everywhere, from face-to-face activities to online social networks such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. In social networks, ties (relationships) are connections between people. The change of social relationships over time consequently leads to the evolution of the social network structure. At the same time, ties serve as carriers to transfer pieces of information from one person to another.

Studying social ties is critical to understanding the fundamental processes behind the network. Although many studies on social networks have been carried out over the last many decades, most of the work either used small in-lab datasets, or focused …