Predictors of Short-Term Decay of Cell Phone Contacts in a Large Scale Communication Network

In this paper, the authors explore the question of short-term decay of cell-phone contacts as a problem of decay/persistence prediction: determining what local structural features allow one to best determine whether certain dyads that are considered to be connected during a given time window will be disconnected during an immediately adjacent time window. Using large-scale data on millions of dyads from a large non-U.S. cell phone provider, they investigate to what extent they can gain empirical leverage on the decay prediction problem.