Ultra-efficient information detection on large-scale online social networks

Jiachen Sun, Ling Feng, Mingwei Du, Xiao Ma, Zhengping Fan, Peter Gloor and Yanqing Hu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2021, vol. 581, issue C

Abstract: As a powerful and low-cost instant information dissemination platform, large-scale online social networks (OSNs) play a pivotal role in shaping our modern information age. The efficient detection of wide-spreading information in OSNs is very important in many aspects including public opinion supervision, social governance, stock markets, counter-terrorism and presidential election. However, real-world OSNs have gigantic sizes and thus their full structural data are usually unavailable, making this problem extremely challenging. In this work, we illustrate the close mapping between efficient detection and optimal spreading from the perspective of network percolation theory. This analogy inspires us to propose a theory of using only limited local network information to select the optimal set of information sensors. Through extensive simulations on both synthetic and real-world networks, we find that for networks with theoretically infinite size, only a finite and small number of sensor nodes are needed to detect the global spreading information with almost certainty. Most importantly, we empirically confirm the utility of our theory on the largest micro blog in China by crawling almost the full Sina Weibo social network with 99,546,027 users in 2014 and the real spreading data of Weibo messages.

Keywords: Complex network; Complex system; Social networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437121004775
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:581:y:2021:i:c:s0378437121004775

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2021.126204

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().