Information Spreading Dynamics on Adaptive Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper models the co-evolution of information diffusion and network topology in social networks, showing that adaptive rewiring enhances spreading and identifying thresholds for diffusion success.

Contribution

It introduces a co-evolution model combining SIS diffusion with adaptive network rewiring, supported by theoretical and simulation analyses.

Findings

Adaptive rewiring broadens information spread.

Two thresholds determine diffusion outcomes.

Theoretical results align with simulations.

Abstract

There is currently growing interest in modeling the information diffusion on social networks across multi-disciplines. The majority of the corresponding research has focused on information diffusion independently, ignoring the network evolution in the diffusion process. Therefore, it is more reasonable to describe the real diffusion systems by the co-evolution between network topologies and information states. In this work, we propose a mechanism considering the coevolution between information states and network topology simultaneously, in which the information diffusion was executed as an SIS process and network topology evolved based on the adaptive assumption. The theoretical analyses based on the Markov approach were very consistent with simulation. Both simulation results and theoretical analyses indicated that the adaptive process, in which informed individuals would rewire the links between the informed neighbors to a random non-neighbor node, can enhance information diffusion (leading to much broader spreading). In addition, we obtained that two threshold values exist for the information diffusion on adaptive networks, i.e., if the information propagation probability is less than the first threshold, information cannot diffuse and dies out immediately; if the propagation probability is between the first and second threshold, information will spread to a finite range and die out gradually; and if the propagation probability is larger than the second threshold, information will diffuse to a certain size of population in the network. These results may shed some light on understanding the co-evolution between information diffusion and network topology.