Preferred attachment model of affiliation network

Abstract

In an affiliation network vertices are linked to attributes and two vertices are declared adjacent whenever they share a common attribute. For example, two customers of an internet shop are called adjacent if they have purchased the same or similar items. Assuming that each newly arrived customer is linked preferentially to already popular items we obtain a preferred attachment model of an evolving affiliation network. We show that the network has a scale-free property and establish the asymptotic degree distribution.