On the Evolution of Contacts and Communities in Networks of Face-to-Face Proximity

Communities are a central aspect in the formation of social interaction networks. In this paper, we analyze the evolution of communities in networks of face-to-face proximity. As our application context, we consider four scientific conferences. We compare the basic properties of the contact graphs to describe the properties of the contact networks and analyze the resulting community structure using state-of-the-art automic community detection algorithms. Specifically, we analyze the evolution of contacts and communities over time to consider the stability of the respective communities. In addition, we assess different factors which have an influence on the quality of community prediction. Overall, we provide first important insights into the evolution of contacts and communities in face-to-face contact networks.