2,178 research outputs found
Theories for influencer identification in complex networks
In social and biological systems, the structural heterogeneity of interaction
networks gives rise to the emergence of a small set of influential nodes, or
influencers, in a series of dynamical processes. Although much smaller than the
entire network, these influencers were observed to be able to shape the
collective dynamics of large populations in different contexts. As such, the
successful identification of influencers should have profound implications in
various real-world spreading dynamics such as viral marketing, epidemic
outbreaks and cascading failure. In this chapter, we first summarize the
centrality-based approach in finding single influencers in complex networks,
and then discuss the more complicated problem of locating multiple influencers
from a collective point of view. Progress rooted in collective influence
theory, belief-propagation and computer science will be presented. Finally, we
present some applications of influencer identification in diverse real-world
systems, including online social platforms, scientific publication, brain
networks and socioeconomic systems.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure
Path diversity improves the identification of influential spreaders
Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks is a crucial problem
which relates to wide applications. Many methods based on the global
information such as -shell and PageRank have been applied to rank spreaders.
However, most of related previous works overwhelmingly focus on the number of
paths for propagation, while whether the paths are diverse enough is usually
overlooked. Generally, the spreading ability of a node might not be strong if
its propagation depends on one or two paths while the other paths are dead
ends. In this Letter, we introduced the concept of path diversity and find that
it can largely improve the ranking accuracy. We further propose a local method
combining the information of path number and path diversity to identify
influential nodes in complex networks. This method is shown to outperform many
well-known methods in both undirected and directed networks. Moreover, the
efficiency of our method makes it possible to be applied to very large systems.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure
Social influence analysis in microblogging platforms - a topic-sensitive based approach
The use of Social Media, particularly microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has proven to be an effective channel for promoting ideas to online audiences. In a world where information can bias public opinion it is essential to analyse the propagation and influence of information in large-scale networks. Recent research studying social media data to rank users by topical relevance have largely focused on the “retweet", “following" and “mention" relations. In this paper we propose the use of semantic profiles for deriving influential users based on the retweet subgraph of the Twitter graph. We introduce a variation of the PageRank algorithm for analysing users’ topical and entity influence based on the topical/entity relevance of a retweet relation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related algorithms including HITS, InDegree and Topic-Sensitive PageRank. We also introduce VisInfluence, a visualisation platform for presenting top influential users based on a topical query need
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