Quantifying the contact memory in temporal human interactions

As the access to high resolution datasets from real physical proximity becomes more and more convenient, plenty of temporal network models have been proposed to model human interaction patterns. However, less work has been devoted to investigating that to what degree the contact network expresses human memory, which is much crucial to forming a realistic network structure. Here we analyze three empirical datasets which reflect temporal human face-to-face interactions. We first quantify the strength of contact memory on the agent level and network level, respectively. We find that human interactions have the short-term memory. Then, we study the difference between the duration of the consecutive interaction events of the same two agents. We find that the contact memory exists in the duration of the individual interaction events.