We study a unique dataset that looks at student friendships in real life and on Facebook. We consider two types of friendships: strong and weak, which are defined differently for real and Facebook friendships. For real friends, 5 contacts per month is considered a strong tie, while less than that but more than 5 contacts in six months is considered a weak tie. On Facebook where communication is more frequent to friends are considered strongly connected if they communicate at least 5 times a weak. Any less than that, but still more than 5 times a month and the Facebook friendship is considered as weak.
Based on this four types of network ties we define a multiplex network with 4 layers: strong offline, weak offline, strong online, weak online.
A visualization of the 4 layers using MuxViz.
The resulting multiplex network is analysed using simple graph metrics such as reciprocity and transitivity that are expanded to mutliplex networks. For more details please see the supporting paper.
Three cycles metric calculated on 6 layers of the multiplex graph (4 original, 2 aggregated).