Duration-Aware Dissimilarity in Temporal Networks

Abstract

Temporal-network comparison becomes substantially more challenging when interactions are associated with explicit traversal times, since both event timing and duration determine temporal reachability and journey performance. We introduce a duration-aware dissimilarity framework for temporal networks whose edges carry departure times and traversal durations. The proposed approach compares networks through source-specific temporal-distance profiles using the $1$-Wasserstein distance, thereby retaining both temporal information and source correspondence. We evaluate the framework on real public-transport timetable networks under controlled schedule delays, duration-aware randomized reference models, and naturally occurring temporal variations. We further benchmark the proposed measure against existing path-based temporal dissimilarity approaches under the same perturbation scenarios. The results show that the proposed representation responds consistently to both the extent and the magnitude of temporal disruption, while retaining distinctions that may be compressed by contact- or hop-based temporal summaries. Overall, the findings support duration-aware temporal distances as a useful basis for comparing temporal systems in which traversal and waiting times directly affect network performance.