Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 16: Tipping Points in Social and Climate Systems (accompanying session for SYTP)

SOE 16.3: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 12. März 2026, 12:15–12:30, GÖR/0226

Generating Representative Social Networks for modeling social tipping points — •Kamiel Gülpen and Vítor Vasconcelos — University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Addressing some of today's most pressing challenges, from climate change to public health crises, requires triggering collective behavioral shifts through social tipping points (STPs). These phenomena have been extensively modeled using synthetic network topologies, which provide valuable theoretical insights but often incompletely represent the mixing patterns that influence tipping dynamics in real populations. Understanding when STPs occur thus requires real-world network data. While such data remains scarce, government agencies possess rich information on household, family, neighborhood, and work/school connections, but often in aggregated form due to privacy constraints. This aggregated data reveals group-level mixing patterns but lacks the individual network topology necessary for modeling diffusion processes. To bridge this gap, we present the Aggregated Social Network Unfolding (ASNU) framework, which generates representative multiplex social networks from aggregated demographic data. Applied to Amsterdam's population, ASNU reconstructs networks across social layers while preserving key structural properties. We also introduce the Social Relational Attachment (SRA) model for generating realistic social networks when aggregated edge data is unavailable. Unlike previous models relying solely on homophily, SRA incorporates both homophilic and heterophilic bonding through tunable demographic distance parameters.

Keywords: Social tipping points; Network generation; Multiplex networks; Homophily; Heterophily