Greedy Network Growth Model of Social Network Service

Abstract

As new network communication tools are developed, social network services (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming part of a social phenomenon globally impacting on society. Many researchers are therefore studying the structure of relationship networks among users. We propose a greedy network growth model that appropriately increases nodes and links while automatically reproducing the target network. We handle a wide range of networks with high expressive ability. Results of experiments showed that we accurately reproduced 92.4% of 189 target networks from real services. The model also enabled us to reproduce 30 networks built up by existing network models. We thus show that the proposed model represents the expressiveness of many existing network models.