Real-world Walk Processes on Networks

Abstract: What do (association) football passes and financial transactions have in common? In both cases, the basis for record-keeping is that these events move something tangible from what we can call one node in a network to another. Ball sports and the circulation of money are two examples of walk processes found in the wild, and the notion of a real-world walk process helps to conceptualize, analyze, and model the corresponding systems. This talk will introduce this topic in general and then dive into specific analyses that turned out especially interesting: transforming passes into passing sequences uncovers intriguing dynamics of play, and tracing e-money across transactions lets us characterize usage patterns of mobile money and visualize e-money flows.