The Dynamics of Actor Loyalty to Groups in Affiliation Networks

In this paper, we introduce a method for analyzing the temporal dynamics of affiliation networks. We define affiliation groups which describe temporally related subsets of actors and describe an approach for exploring changing memberships in these affiliation groups over time. To model the dynamic behavior in these networks, we consider the concept of loyalty and introduce a measure that captures an actorpsilas loyalty to an affiliation group as the degree of dasiacommitmentpsila an actor shows to the group over time. We evaluate our measure using two real world affiliation networks: a senate bill co-sponsorship network and a dolphin network. The results show how the behavior of actors in different affiliation groups change dynamically over time, reinforcing the utility of our measure for understanding the loyalty of actors to time-varying affiliation groups.