Social Network Generation

Issues on Social Network Generation for Evaluating Visualizations

Watts and Strogatz first described in (Watts, D. J. and S. H. Strogatz (1998). "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks." Nature 393: 440 - 442) the concept of small-world networks. They formalized these networks as graphs with three properties: power-law degree distribution, high clustering coefficient and small average shortest path. In the same paper they propose a basic model fitting these properties consisting in a grid (fixed local neighborhood) with additional links simulating some unexpected relations support to the six degrees of separation discovered by Milgram (Milgram, S. (1967). "The small world problem." Psychology Today: 60-67). Barabási and Albert proposed an incremental model to improve it (Barabási, A.-L. and R. Albert (1999). "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks." Science 286(5439): 509 - 512. ). Since Watts and Strogatz’ model, several have been proposed each generating networks with one or two of the described properties (power-law) but none combine the three of them.