Measuring Contextual Relationships in Temporal Social Networks by Circle Link

Network science has released its talents in social network analysis based on the information of static topologies. In reality social contacts are dynamic and evolve concurrently in time. Nowadays they can be recorded by ubiquitous information technologies, and generated into temporal social networks to provide new sights in social reality mining. Here, we define circle link to measure contextual relationships in three empirical social temporal networks, and find that the tendency of friends having frequent continuous interactions with their common friend prefer to be close, which can be considered as the extension of Granovetter’s hypothesis in temporal social networks. Finally, we present a heuristic method based on circle link to predict relationships and acquire acceptable results.