Uncovering structure dynamics of the evolving networks

The evolving networks have attracted extensive attentions in the past several years since the availability of networked data in many fields, such as social media, transportation, and the World Wide Web. This paper presents a simple method to measure the structure dynamics of the evolving networks using the concepts of stable nodes and new nodes. Stable nodes refer to the ones that never disappear in the whole observing time period, and they can be used to examine the structure robustness of the evolving networks. New nodes mean the ones appearing in the current time period but not in the previous time period, and they are employed to investigate the structure change of the evolving networks. To verify the usage of our method, we apply it to explore the evolution of the US Airport Network (USAN) from the year 1991 to 2011 and the street network in Beijing from the year 2009 to 2012. Our findings suggested universal structural patterns of the evolving networks, which might benefit network scientists to devise new models or transportation administrators to better design and manage the network.