On the Structure of Changes in Dynamic Contact Networks

We present a methodology to investigate the structure of dynamic networks in terms of concentration of changes in the network. We handle dynamic networks as series of graphs on a fixed set of nodes and consider the changes occurring between two consecutive graphs in the series. We apply our methodology to various dynamic contact networks coming from different contexts and we show that changes in these networks exhibit a non-trivial structure: they are not spread all over the network but are instead concentrated around a small fraction of nodes. We compare our observations on real-world networks to three classical dynamic network models and show that they do not capture this key property.