Evidence of Temporal Artifacts in Social Networks

There has been extensive research on social networks and methods for specific tasks such as: community detection, link prediction, and tracing information cascades; and a recent emphasis on using temporal dynamics of social networks to improve method performance. The underlying models are based on structural properties of the network, some of which we believe to be artifacts introduced from common misrepresentations of social networks. Specifically, representing a social network or series of social networks as an accumulation of network snapshots is problematic. In this paper, we use a dataset with timestamped interactions to demonstrate how cumulative graphs differ from activity-based graphs and may introduce temporal artifacts.