Table 1 Description of the four reference datasets, including the observation span and source

Platform

Wall-posting on Facebook in New Orleans, where a directed link is created if a user posts on another user’s wall. Data obtained from crawling public profiles in January 2009, each link tracks activity for one year after the first communication event. Total of \(\sim 41\)K nodes, \(\sim 183.5\)K edges and \(\sim 854.6\)K wall posts.

1 year

Viswanath et al. (2009)

Email

Dataset of emails between employees of Enron Corporation, obtained as part of an investigation into Enron’s collapse. Sampling might focus on 150 users. Total of \(\sim 20\)K users, 297.5K edges and \(\sim 1.1\)M emails.

6 years

Rossi and Ahmed (2015)

Forum

Activity on a movie forum, where a contact is created if a user comments on a thread posted by another user. Total of \(\sim 6\)K users, \(\sim 138.1\)K edges and \(\sim 1.4\)M thread comments.

7 years

Karimi et al. (2014)

Mobile

Call Detail Records of mobile phone calls from an operator in a European country in 2007, where the operator had approximately 20% market share. We used a reduced version of the full dataset, where we focused on a region of the country. The small version of the dataset has \(\sim 174\)K nodes, \(\sim 190\)K edges and \(\sim 6.8\)M phone calls.

4 months

Onnela et al. (2007a)