Diffusion in Networks With Overlapping Community Structure

TL;DR

This paper investigates how contagions spread in networks with overlapping communities, revealing that such structures facilitate rapid diffusion and contain short paths, impacting social and epidemiological processes.

Contribution

It extends prior work by analyzing diffusion in networks with overlapping communities, combining theoretical models and empirical network analysis.

Findings

Contagions spread quickly in overlapping community networks.

Overlapping communities create short paths facilitating diffusion.

Empirical networks exhibit rapid contagion spread due to structure.

Abstract

In this work we study diffusion in networks with community structure. We first replicate and extend work on networks with non-overlapping community structure. We then study diffusion on network models that have overlapping community structure. We study contagions in the standard SIR model, and complex contagions thought to be better models of some social diffusion processes. Finally, we investigate diffusion on empirical networks with known overlapping community structure, by analysing the structure of such networks, and by simulating contagion on them. We find that simple and complex contagions can spread fast in networks with overlapping community structure. We also find that short paths exist through overlapping community structure on empirical networks.