Uncovering offline event similarity of online friends by constructing null models*

Abstract

The emergence of Event-based Social Network (EBSN) data that contain both social and event information has cleared the way to study the social interactive relationship between the virtual interactions and physical interactions. In existing studies, it is not really clear which factors affect event similarity between online friends and the influence degree of each factor. In this study, a multi-layer network based on the Plancast service data is constructed. The the user’s events belongingness is shuffled by constructing two null models to detect offline event similarity between online friends. The results indicate that there is a strong correlation between online social proximity and offline event similarity. The micro-scale structures at multi-levels of the Plancast online social network are also maintained by constructing 0k–3k null models to study how the micro-scale characteristics of online networks affect the similarity of offline events. It is found that the assortativity pattern is a significant micro-scale characteristic to maintain offline event similarity. Finally, we study how structural diversity of online friends affects the offline event similarity. We find that the subgraph structure of common friends has no positive impact on event similarity while the number of common friends plays a key role, which is different from other studies. In addition, we discuss the randomness of different null models, which can measure the degree of information availability in privacy protection. Our study not only uncovers the factors that affect offline event similarity between friends but also presents a framework for understanding the pattern of human mobility.