A multilayer network-based framework for investigating the evolution and resilience of multimodal social networks

In recent literature, multilayer networks are increasingly being used to model and manage complex scenarios. One of them well suited to be modeled and managed using multilayer networks is represented by multimodal social networks, in which nodes and edges can be of different types. In fact, in this case, each layer of the multilayer network can be used to model one type of nodes in the multimodal social network while the edges of the latter can be represented by intra-layer edges of the former. In this paper, we want to demonstrate the feasibility of this idea by proposing a framework for analyzing multimodal social networks through the analysis of a corresponding multilayer network. In particular, we use our framework to address two challenging issues, namely the evolution of multilayer networks and their resilience to intra- and inter-layer perturbations. After introducing the model and describing the technical details of our framework, we present several experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.