Close Relationships: A Study of Mobile Communication Records

Mobile phone communication as digital service generates ever-increasing datasets of human communication actions, which in turn allow us to investigate the structure and evolution of social interactions and their networks. These datasets can be used to study the structuring of such egocentric networks with respect to the strength of the relationships by assuming direct dependence of the communication intensity on the strength of the social tie. Recently we have discovered that there are significant differences between the first and further “best friends” from the point of view of age and gender preferences. Here we introduce a control parameter pmax based on the statistics of communication with the first and second “best friend” and use it to filter the data. We find that when pmax is decreased the identification of the “best friend” becomes less ambiguous and the earlier observed effects get stronger, thus corroborating them. V. Palchykov · J. Kertész · K. Kaski ( ) Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science (BECS), Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 12200, 00076, Aalto, Finland e-mail: [email protected] V. Palchykov e-mail: [email protected] J. Kertész e-mail: [email protected] V. Palchykov Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 79011 Lviv, Ukraine J. Kertész Center for Network Science, Central European University, Nador u. 9, 1051 Budapest, Hungary J. Kertész Hungary Institute of Physics BME, Budapest, Budafoki ut 8, 1111, Hungary R. Dunbar Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK 736 V. Palchykov et al.