Representing dynamic social networks in discrete event social simulation

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan K. Alt;Stephen Lieberman

  • Affiliations:
  • Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California;Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

One of the key structural components of social systems is the social network. The representation of this network structure is key to providing a valid representation of the society under study. The social science concept of homophily provides a conceptual model of how social networks are formed and evolve over time. Previous work described the results of social simulation using a static homophily network. In order to gain the full benefit of modeling societies a representation of how the social network changes over time is required. This paper introduces the implementation of a dynamic homophily network, along with a case study exploring the sensitivity of model outputs to the parameters describing the network and applying social network change detection methods (SNCD) to model output.