TVG-OSN: A Time Varying Graph Model for Online Social Network Dynamics Analysis

Online social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and YouTube have become major platforms for sharing content, socialization, e-commerce, security monitoring, etc. Numerous researchers are devoted to studying these platforms that are modeled from a variety of perspectives. Hence, depending on the research, online social networks are modeled using different annotations that often refer to the same concepts. Many of these models ignore or discretize the temporal dimension of social networks leading to a loss of temporal information. Other models consider communications on these platforms to be instantaneous overlooking the delay between its initiation and processing, or omit the representation of identity maps between nodes at different times. Also, most models do not allow for the representation of the states of social network actors at different times. We provide in this paper a simple temporal graph model for online social networks (TVG-OSN) that fully accounts for their dynamics in addition to a new definition of the latency function between users.