Manivannan et al. REGULAR ARTICLE Are the different layers of a social network conveying the same information? Ajaykumar Manivannan1, W. Quin Yow1, Roland Bouffanais1y and Alain Barrat2,3*y *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Comprehensive and quantitative investigations of social theories and phenomena Somapah Road, 487372, Singapore increasingly benefit from the vast breadth of data describing human social 2 Aix Marseille Univ, Universit´ede relations, which is now available within the realm of computational social science. Toulon, CNRS, CPT, Marseille, France Such data are, however, typically proxies for one of the many interaction layers 3Data Science Laboratory, composing social networks, which can be defined in many ways and are typically Institute for Scientific Interchange composed of communication of various types (e.g., phone calls, face-to-face (ISI) Foundation, Torino, Italy Full list of author information is communication, etc.). As a result, many studies focus on one single layer, available at the end of the article corresponding to the data at hand. Several studies have, however, shown that y Equal contributor these layers are not interchangeable, despite the presence of a certain level of correlations between them. Here, we investigate whether different layers of interactions among individuals lead to similar conclusions with respect to the presence of homophily patterns in a population|homophily represents one of the widest studied phenomenon in social networks. To this aim, we consider a dataset describing interactions and links of various nature in a population of Asian students with diverse nationalities, first language and gender.