The rhythms of transient relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends

A fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of social tie to explore this question: these relationships are characterized by distinguishable starting and ending temporal points, linking the question of tie longevity to relationship finite lifetime. In this study, we use mobile phone data sets from the UK and Italy to analyze the weekly allocation of time invested in maintaining transient relationships. We find that more relationships are created during weekdays, with a greater proportion of them receiving more contact during these days of the week in the long term. The smaller group of relationships that receive more phone calls during the weekend tend to remain active for more time. We uncover a sorting process by which some ties are moved from weekdays to weekends and vice versa, mostly in the first half of the relationship. This process also carries more information about the ultimate lif..., , , # The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends

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Data and Jupyter notebook with analysis for the aforementioned paper

## Description of the data and file structure

There are four data files

* `sourceUK.csv` contains mobile calla data for [a study](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.08.005) conducted by Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar in the UK.
* `sourceIT.csv` contains mobile call data for the [MTL study](https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0064-6) in Italy.
* `transientsUK.csv` contains a collection of transient relationships in the UK, following the criteria described [here](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32206-2).
* `transientsIT.csv` contains the information for the transient relationships in Italy.

## Variables used

All data files use the same names for variables.

* `ego`: identifier for ego
* `alter`: identifier for alter
* `pair`: a combination of the identifiers for ego and alter
* `time`: timestamp for the phone...