Tracking Co-evolution of Behavior and Relationships with Mobile Phones

The co-evolution of social relationships and individual behavior in time and space has important implications, but is poorly understood because of the difficulty of closely tracking the everyday life of a complete community. We offer evidence that relationships and behavior co-evolve in a student dormitory, based on monthly surveys and location tracking through resident cellular phones over a period of nine months. We demonstrate that a Markov jump process could capture the co-evolution in terms of the rates at which residents visit places and friends. Our co-evolution model will be useful in bridging sensor networks data and organizational dynamics theories, simulating different ways to shape behavior and relationships, and turning mobile phone data into data products.