Impact of environmental changes on the dynamics of temporal networks

Abstract

Dynamics of complex social systems has often been described in the framework of temporal networks, where links are considered to exist only at the moment of interaction between nodes. Such interaction patterns are not only driven by internal interaction mechanisms, but also affected by environmental changes. To investigate the impact of the environmental changes on the dynamics of temporal networks, we analyze several face-to-face interaction datasets using the multiscale entropy (MSE) method to find that the observed temporal correlations can be categorized according to the environmental similarity of datasets such as classes and break times in schools. By devising and studying a temporal network model considering a periodically changing environment as well as a preferential activation mechanism, we numerically show that our model could successfully reproduce various empirical results by the MSE method in terms of multiscale temporal correlations. Our results demonstrate that the environmental changes can play an important role in shaping the dynamics of temporal networks when the interactions between nodes are influenced by the environment of the systems.