Link formation in undergraduate students friendship network

Link formation is the foundation for understanding, analyzing and modeling friendship networks. We analyzed a friendship network comprising 190 students at Northwest University for Nationalities with attributes (gender, nationality, hometown, major, class and dorm). We found that link formation is dominated by a combination of effects arising from geographic proximity and homophily. Attributes dorm and class are greater determinants of link formation than other attributes. Our further study showed that their effects on link formation decay to zero as a power law with exponent -0.9 when distance between two students increases. We came to conclusion that homophily and proximity both are local-effective. Hence, the spatial element is crucial for link formation in friendship network. At last, we discussed link formation at different ranges.