A limitation of the Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) is that it assumes at a particular @math layer of the neural network model only the @math order neighbourhood nodes of a social network are influential. Furthermore, the GCN has been evaluated on citation and knowledge graphs, but not extensively on friendship-based social graphs. The drawback associated with the dependencies between layers and the order of node neighbourhood for the GCN can be more prevalent for friendship-based graphs. The evaluation of the full potential of the GCN on friendship-based social network requires openly available datasets in larger quantities. However, most available social network datasets are not complete. Also, the majority of the available social network datasets do not contain both the features and ground truth labels. In this work, firstly, we provide a guideline on simulating dynamic social networks, with ground truth labels and features, both coupled with the topology. Secondly, we introduce an open-source Python-based simulation library. We argue that the topology of the network is driven by a set of latent variables, termed as the social DNA (sDNA). We consider the sDNA as labels for the nodes. Finally, by evaluating on our simulated datasets, we propose four new variants of the GCN, mainly to overcome the limitation of dependency between the order of node-neighbourhood and a particular layer of the model. We then evaluate the performance of all the models and our results show that on 27 out of the 30 simulated datasets our proposed GCN variants outperform the original model.
Human relations are driven by social events - people interact, exchange information, share knowledge and emotions, or gather news from mass media. These events leave traces in human memory. The initial strength of a trace depends on cognitive factors such as emotions or attention span. Each trace continuously weakens over time unless another related event activity strengthens it. Here, we introduce a novel Cognition-driven Social Network (CogSNet) model that accounts for cognitive aspects of social perception and explicitly represents human memory dynamics. For validation, we apply our model to NetSense data on social interactions among university students. The results show that CogSNet significantly improves quality of modeling of human interactions in social networks.