Information diffusion in structured online social networks

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (13) ◽  
pp. 1550063 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pei Li ◽  
Yini Zhang ◽  
Fengcai Qiao ◽  
Hui Wang

Nowadays, due to the word-of-mouth effect, online social networks have been considered to be efficient approaches to conduct viral marketing, which makes it of great importance to understand the diffusion dynamics in online social networks. However, most research on diffusion dynamics in epidemiology and existing social networks cannot be applied directly to characterize online social networks. In this paper, we propose models to characterize the information diffusion in structured online social networks with push-based forwarding mechanism. We introduce the term user influence to characterize the average number of times that messages are browsed which is incurred by a given type user generating a message, and study the diffusion threshold, above which the user influence of generating a message will approach infinity. We conduct simulations and provide the simulation results, which are consistent with the theoretical analysis results perfectly. These results are of use in understanding the diffusion dynamics in online social networks and also critical for advertisers in viral marketing who want to estimate the user influence before posting an advertisement.

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (22) ◽  
pp. 1450147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pei Li ◽  
Su He ◽  
Hui Wang ◽  
Xin Zhang

Online social networks have attracted increasing attention since they provide various approaches for hundreds of millions of people to stay connected with their friends. However, most research on diffusion dynamics in epidemiology cannot be applied directly to characterize online social networks, where users are heterogeneous and may act differently according to their standpoints. In this paper, we propose models to characterize the competitive diffusion in online social networks with heterogeneous users. We classify messages into two types (i.e., positive and negative) and users into three types (i.e., positive, negative and neutral). We estimate the positive (negative) influence for a user generating a given type message, which is the number of times that positive (negative) messages are processed (i.e., read) incurred by this action. We then consider the diffusion threshold, above which the corresponding influence will approach infinity, and the effect threshold, above which the unexpected influence of generating a message will exceed the expected one. We verify all these results by simulations, which show the analysis results are perfectly consistent with the simulation results. These results are of importance in understanding the diffusion dynamics in online social networks, and also critical for advertisers in viral marketing where there are fans, haters and neutrals.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (03) ◽  
pp. 1450004 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEI LI ◽  
YUNCHUAN SUN ◽  
YINGWEN CHEN ◽  
ZHI TIAN

Online social networks have attracted remarkable attention since they provide various approaches for hundreds of millions of people to stay connected with their friends. Due to the existence of information overload, the research on diffusion dynamics in epidemiology cannot be adopted directly to that in online social networks. In this paper, we consider diffusion dynamics in online social networks subject to information overload, and model the information-processing process of a user by a queue with a batch arrival and a finite buffer. We use the average number of times a message is processed after it is generated by a given user to characterize the user influence, which is then estimated through theoretical analysis for a given network. We validate the accuracy of our estimation by simulations, and apply the results to study the impacts of different factors on the user influence. Among the observations, we find that the impact of network size on the user influence is marginal while the user influence decreases with assortativity due to information overload, which is particularly interesting.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pei Li ◽  
Wei Li ◽  
Hui Wang ◽  
Xin Zhang

Due to the existence of information overload in social networks, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to find useful information according to their interests. This paper takes Twitter-like social networks into account and proposes models to characterize the process of information diffusion under information overload. Users are classified into different types according to their in-degrees and out-degrees, and user behaviors are generalized into two categories: generating and forwarding. View scope is introduced to model the user information-processing capability under information overload, and the average number of times a message appears in view scopes after it is generated by a given type user is adopted to characterize the information diffusion efficiency, which is calculated theoretically. To verify the accuracy of theoretical analysis results, we conduct simulations and provide the simulation results, which are consistent with the theoretical analysis results perfectly. These results are of importance to understand the diffusion dynamics in social networks, and this analysis framework can be extended to consider more realistic situations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (10) ◽  
pp. 13730-13731
Author(s):  
Ece C. Mutlu

This doctoral consortium presents an overview of my anticipated PhD dissertation which focuses on employing quantum Bayesian networks for social learning. The project, mainly, aims to expand the use of current quantum probabilistic models in human decision-making from two agents to multi-agent systems. First, I cultivate the classical Bayesian networks which are used to understand information diffusion through human interaction on online social networks (OSNs) by taking into account the relevance of multitude of social, psychological, behavioral and cognitive factors influencing the process of information transmission. Since quantum like models require quantum probability amplitudes, the complexity will be exponentially increased with increasing uncertainty in the complex system. Therefore, the research will be followed by a study on optimization of heuristics. Here, I suggest to use an belief entropy based heuristic approach. This research is an interdisciplinary research which is related with the branches of complex systems, quantum physics, network science, information theory, cognitive science and mathematics. Therefore, findings can contribute significantly to the areas related mainly with social learning behavior of people, and also to the aforementioned branches of complex systems. In addition, understanding the interactions in complex systems might be more viable via the findings of this research since probabilistic approaches are not only used for predictive purposes but also for explanatory aims.


Author(s):  
Yifeng Zhang ◽  
Xiaoqing Li ◽  
Te-Wei Wang

Online social networks (OSNs) are quickly becoming a key component of the Internet. With their widespread acceptance among the general public and the tremendous amount time that users spend on them, OSNs provide great potentials for marketing, especially viral marketing, in which marketing messages are spread among consumers via the word-of-mouth process. A critical task in viral marketing is influencer identification, i.e. finding a group of consumers as the initial receivers of a marketing message. Using agent-based modeling, this paper examines the effectiveness of tie strength as a criterion for influencer identification on OSNs. Results show that identifying influencers by the number of strong connections that a user has is superior to doing so by the total number of connections when the strength of strong connections is relatively high compared to that of weak connections or there is a relatively high percentage of strong connections between users. Implications of the results are discussed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (07) ◽  
pp. 1350047 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEI LI ◽  
KAI XING ◽  
DAPENG WANG ◽  
XIN ZHANG ◽  
HUI WANG

Research on social networks has received remarkable attention, since many people use social networks to broadcast information and stay connected with their friends. However, due to the information overload in social networks, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to find useful information. This paper takes Facebook-like social networks into account, and models the process of information diffusion under information overload. The term view scope is introduced to model the user information-processing capability under information overload, and the average number of times a message appears in view scopes after it is generated is proposed to characterize the information diffusion efficiency. Through theoretical analysis, we find that factors such as network structure and view scope number have no impact on the information diffusion efficiency, which is a surprising result. To verify the results, we conduct simulations and provide the simulation results, which are consistent with the theoretical analysis results perfectly.


2023 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-51
Author(s):  
Huacheng Li ◽  
Chunhe Xia ◽  
Tianbo Wang ◽  
Sheng Wen ◽  
Chao Chen ◽  
...  

Studying information diffusion in SNS (Social Networks Service) has remarkable significance in both academia and industry. Theoretically, it boosts the development of other subjects such as statistics, sociology, and data mining. Practically, diffusion modeling provides fundamental support for many downstream applications (e.g., public opinion monitoring, rumor source identification, and viral marketing). Tremendous efforts have been devoted to this area to understand and quantify information diffusion dynamics. This survey investigates and summarizes the emerging distinguished works in diffusion modeling. We first put forward a unified information diffusion concept in terms of three components: information, user decision, and social vectors, followed by a detailed introduction of the methodologies for diffusion modeling. And then, a new taxonomy adopting hybrid philosophy (i.e., granularity and techniques) is proposed, and we made a series of comparative studies on elementary diffusion models under our taxonomy from the aspects of assumptions, methods, and pros and cons. We further summarized representative diffusion modeling in special scenarios and significant downstream tasks based on these elementary models. Finally, open issues in this field following the methodology of diffusion modeling are discussed.


Like web spam has been a major threat to almost every aspect of the current World Wide Web, similarly social spam especially in information diffusion has led a serious threat to the utilities of online social media. To combat this challenge the significance and impact of such entities and content should be analyzed critically. In order to address this issue, this work usedTwitter as a case study and modeled the contents of information through topic modeling and coupled it with the user oriented feature to deal it with a good accuracy. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) a widely used topic modeling technique is applied to capture the latent topics from the tweets’ documents. The major contribution of this work is twofold: constructing the dataset which serves as the ground-truth for analyzing the diffusion dynamics of spam/non-spam information and analyzing the effects of topics over the diffusibility. Exhaustive experiments clearly reveal the variation in topics shared by the spam and nonspam tweets. The rise in popularity of online social networks, not only attracts legitimate users but also the spammers. Legitimate users use the services of OSNs for a good purpose i.e., maintaining the relations with friends/colleagues, sharing the information of interest, increasing the reach of their business through advertisings


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