Extracting behavioural properties from face-to-face interactions temporal networks: a measure of egonet persistency

Abstract

Understanding how individuals repeat social interactions over time is a central problem in the analysis of temporal networks. In social systems, repeated interactions shape processes such as information diffusion, collective coordination, and the emergence of social structure. Existing measures of egonet persistence often conflate genuine behavioural regularities with structural effects such as node degree, making it difficult to distinguish meaningful temporal correlations from random mixing. In this work, we introduce the Neighbourhood Persistency Criterion (NPC), a statistically grounded framework for quantifying egonet persistence across time. NPC combines classical similarity measures with tailored null models controlling for network topology and interaction weights. We apply this framework to high temporal resolution face-to-face interaction networks collected at four Computational Social Science conferences using the SocioPatterns platform. Our results reveal a common behavioural structure across events, characterised by an exploration$\unicode{x2013}$exploitation trade-off in social interactions. While many individuals alternate between both strategies, others exhibit stable interaction patterns throughout the event. Importantly, these behaviours show little systematic association with socio-demographic attributes, suggesting that interaction strategies are shaped primarily by contextual factors rather than stable individual traits. NPC thus provides a flexible and interpretable tool for studying egonet persistence in temporal networks and social systems.