  In social networks of human individuals, social relationships do not
necessarily last forever as they can either fade gradually with time, resulting
in link aging, or terminate abruptly, causing link deletion, as even old
friendships may cease. In this paper, we study a social network formation model
where we introduce several ways by which a link termination takes place. If we
adopt the link aging, we get a more modular structure with more homogeneously
distributed link weights within communities than when link deletion is used. By
investigating distributions and relations of various network characteristics,
we find that the empirical findings are better reproduced with the link
deletion model. This indicates that link deletion plays a more prominent role
in organizing social networks than link aging.
