Measuring dynamics and structural change of time-dependent socio-economic networks

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This paper addresses the issue of measuring temporal dynamics of complex socio-economic relational systems, represented as time-dependent networks. Network dynamics is first splitted into a structural component, accounting for changes in the network topology, and a non-structural component, accounting for permutation of vertex labels. A quantitative measure of the dynamics and its components is then proposed and it is shown how it can be used to investigate and interpret the time evolution of networks. A real example is discussed, pertaining to the dynamics of a subnetwork of the Italian corporate board network.