Temporal evolution of contacts and communities in networks of face-to-face human interactions

Temporal dynamics of social interaction networks as well as the analysis of communities are key aspects to gain a better understanding of the involved processes, important influence factors, their effects, and their structural implications. In this article, we analyze temporal dynamics of contacts and the evolution of communities in networks of face-to-face proximity. As our application context, we consider four scientific conferences. On a structural level, we focus on static and dynamic properties of the contact graphs. Also, we analyze the resulting community structure using state-of-the-art automatic community detection algorithms. Specifically, we analyze the evolution of contacts and communities over time to consider the stability of the respective communities. Furthermore, 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.