6,455 research outputs found
Infectivity Enhances Prediction of Viral Cascades in Twitter
Models of contagion dynamics, originally developed for infectious diseases,
have proven relevant to the study of information, news, and political opinions
in online social systems. Modelling diffusion processes and predicting viral
information cascades are important problems in network science. Yet, many
studies of information cascades neglect the variation in infectivity across
different pieces of information. Here, we employ early-time observations of
online cascades to estimate the infectivity of distinct pieces of information.
Using simulations and data from real-world Twitter retweets, we demonstrate
that these estimated infectivities can be used to improve predictions about the
virality of an information cascade. Developing our simulations to mimic the
real-world data, we consider the effect of the limited effective time for
transmission of a cascade and demonstrate that a simple model for slow but
non-negligible decay of the infectivity captures the essential properties of
retweet distributions. These results demonstrate the interplay between the
intrinsic infectivity of a tweet and the complex network environment within
which it diffuses, strongly influencing the likelihood of becoming a viral
cascade.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
Competing contagion processes: Complex contagion triggered by simple contagion
Empirical evidence reveals that contagion processes often occur with
competition of simple and complex contagion, meaning that while some agents
follow simple contagion, others follow complex contagion. Simple contagion
refers to spreading processes induced by a single exposure to a contagious
entity while complex contagion demands multiple exposures for transmission.
Inspired by this observation, we propose a model of contagion dynamics with a
transmission probability that initiates a process of complex contagion. With
this probability nodes subject to simple contagion get adopted and trigger a
process of complex contagion. We obtain a phase diagram in the parameter space
of the transmission probability and the fraction of nodes subject to complex
contagion. Our contagion model exhibits a rich variety of phase transitions
such as continuous, discontinuous, and hybrid phase transitions, criticality,
tricriticality, and double transitions. In particular, we find a double phase
transition showing a continuous transition and a following discontinuous
transition in the density of adopted nodes with respect to the transmission
probability. We show that the double transition occurs with an intermediate
phase in which nodes following simple contagion become adopted but nodes with
complex contagion remain susceptible.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
A Comparison of Spatial-based Targeted Disease Containment Strategies using Mobile Phone Data
Epidemic outbreaks are an important healthcare challenge, especially in
developing countries where they represent one of the major causes of mortality.
Approaches that can rapidly target subpopulations for surveillance and control
are critical for enhancing containment processes during epidemics.
Using a real-world dataset from Ivory Coast, this work presents an attempt to
unveil the socio-geographical heterogeneity of disease transmission dynamics.
By employing a spatially explicit meta-population epidemic model derived from
mobile phone Call Detail Records (CDRs), we investigate how the differences in
mobility patterns may affect the course of a realistic infectious disease
outbreak. We consider different existing measures of the spatial dimension of
human mobility and interactions, and we analyse their relevance in identifying
the highest risk sub-population of individuals, as the best candidates for
isolation countermeasures. The approaches presented in this paper provide
further evidence that mobile phone data can be effectively exploited to
facilitate our understanding of individuals' spatial behaviour and its
relationship with the risk of infectious diseases' contagion. In particular, we
show that CDRs-based indicators of individuals' spatial activities and
interactions hold promise for gaining insight of contagion heterogeneity and
thus for developing containment strategies to support decision-making during
country-level pandemics
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