A model for the co-evolution of dynamic social networks and infectious disease dynamics

Recent research shows an increasing interest in the interplay of social networks and infectious diseases. Many studies either neglect explicit changes in health behavior or consider networks to be static, despite empirical evidence that people seek to distance themselves from diseases in social networks. We propose an adaptable steppingstone model that integrates theories of social network formation from sociology, risk perception from health psychology, and infectious diseases from epidemiology. We argue that networking behavior in the context of infectious diseases can be described as a trade-off between the benefits, efforts, and potential harm a connection creates. Agent-based simulations of a specific model case show that: (i) high (perceived) health risks create strong social distancing, thus resulting in low epidemic sizes; (ii) small changes in health behavior can be decisive for whether the outbreak of a disease turns into an epidemic or not; (iii) high benefits for social connections create more ties per agent, providing large numbers of potential transmission routes and opportunities for the disease to travel faster, and (iv) higher costs of maintaining ties with infected others reduce final size of epidemics only when benefits of indirect ties are relatively low. These findings suggest a complex interplay between social network, health behavior, and infectious disease dynamics. Furthermore, they contribute to solving the issue that neglect of explicit health behavior in models of disease spread may create mismatches between observed transmissibility and epidemic sizes of model predictions.

Crowd attraction-driven community evolution on social network

The evolution analysis of community structure of social network will help us understand the composition of social organizations and the evolution of society better. In order to discover the community structure and the regularity of community evolution in large-scale social networks, this paper analyzes the formation process and influencing factors of communities, and proposes a community evolution analysis method of crowd attraction driven. This method uses the traditional community division method to divide the basic community, and introduces the theory of information propagation into complex network to simulate the information propagation of dynamic social networks. Then defines seed node, the activity of basic community and crowd attraction to research the influence of groups on individuals in social networks. Finally, making basic communities as fixed groups in the network and proposing community detection algorithm based on crowd attraction. Experimental results show that the scheme can effectively detect and identify the community structure in large-scale social networks.

Identifying and Evaluating Anomalous Structural Change-based Nodes in Generalized Dynamic Social Networks

Recently, dynamic social network research has attracted a great amount of attention, especially in the area of anomaly analysis that analyzes the anomalous change in the evolution of dynamic social networks. However, most of the current research focused on anomaly analysis of the macro representation of dynamic social networks and failed to analyze the nodes that have anomalous structural changes at a micro level. To identify and evaluate anomalous structural change-based nodes in generalized dynamic social networks that only have limited structural information, this research considers undirected and unweighted graphs and develops a multiple-neighbor superposition similarity method ( ), which mainly consists of a multiple-neighbor range algorithm ( ) and a superposition similarity fluctuation algorithm ( ). introduces observation nodes, characterizes the structural similarities of nodes within multiple-neighbor ranges, and proposes a new multiple-neighbor similarity index on the basis of extensional similarity indices. Subsequently, maximally reflects the structural change of each node, using a new superposition similarity fluctuation index from the perspective of diverse multiple-neighbor similarities. As a result, based on and , not only identifies anomalous structural change-based nodes by detecting the anomalous structural changes of nodes but also evaluates their anomalous degrees by quantifying these changes. Results obtained by comparing with state-of-the-art methods via extensive experiments show that can accurately identify anomalous structural change-based nodes and evaluate their anomalous degrees well.

Generalized Trust and Social Selection Process

Generalized trust relieves individuals in a socially uncertain situation from dyadic constraints of existing ties and helps them change ties with other individuals to acquire better resources. However, much evidence in the emancipation role of generalized trust as a booster of new relationship formation has been limited to laboratory experiments or cross-sectional surveys. We conducted a four-wave longitudinal survey to test whether individuals high in generalized trust actively switch ties and form open triads in dynamic social networks. Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models were employed to analyze structural changes in advice and personal discussion networks among first-year undergraduates. Results showed the predicted patterns of social selection processes based on generalized trust when the dynamics of the two networks were analyzed simultaneously: only in the advice network, individuals high in generalized trust tended to terminate existing ties, create new ties, and show a decreasing trend toward forming close triads when the degree of local clustering was large. Effective tie-formation strategies of individuals high in generalized trust in a multiplex network structure are discussed.