Finding influential spreaders from human activity beyond network location

Most centralities proposed for identifying influential spreaders on social networks to either spread a message or to stop an epidemic require the full topological information of the network on which spreading occurs. In practice, however, collecting all connections between agents in social networks can be hardly achieved. As a result, such metrics could be difficult to apply to real social networks. Consequently, a new approach for identifying influential people without the explicit network information is demanded in order to provide an efficient immunization or spreading strategy, in a practical sense. In this study, we seek a possible way for finding influential spreaders by using the social mechanisms of how social connections are formed in real networks. We find that a reliable immunization scheme can be achieved by asking people how they interact with each other. From these surveys we find that the probabilistic tendency to connect to a hub has the strongest predictive power for influential spreaders among tested social mechanisms. Our observation also suggests that people who connect different communities is more likely to be an influential spreader when a network has a strong modular structure. Our finding implies that not only the effect of network location but also the behavior of individuals is important to design optimal immunization or spreading schemes

Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election

The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets, from 2.2 million users, which contain a link to news outlets. Based on a classification of news outlets curated by www.opensources.co, we find that 25% of these tweets spread either fake or extremely biased news. We characterize the networks of information flow to find the most influential spreaders of fake and traditional news and use causal modeling to uncover how fake news influenced the presidential election. We find that, while top influencers spreading traditional center and left leaning news largely influence the activity of Clinton supporters, this causality is reversed for the fake news: the activity of Trump supporters influences the dynamics of the top fake news spreaders

Collective Influence of Multiple Spreaders Evaluated by Tracing Real Information Flow in Large-Scale Social Networks

Identifying the most influential spreaders that maximize information flow is a central question in network theory. Recently, a scalable method called "Collective Influence (CI)" has been put forward through collective influence maximization. In contrast to heuristic methods evaluating nodes' significance separately, CI method inspects the collective influence of multiple spreaders. Despite that CI applies to the influence maximization problem in percolation model, it is still important to examine its efficacy in realistic information spreading. Here, we examine real-world information flow in various social and scientific platforms including American Physical Society, Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal. Since empirical data cannot be directly mapped to ideal multi-source spreading, we leverage the behavioral patterns of users extracted from data to construct "virtual" information spreading processes. Our results demonstrate that the set of spreaders selected by CI can induce larger scale of information propagation. Moreover, local measures as the number of connections or citations are not necessarily the deterministic factors of nodes' importance in realistic information spreading. This result has significance for rankings scientists in scientific networks like the APS, where the commonly used number of citations can be a poor indicator of the collective influence of authors in the community.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Calculation of the Voronoi boundary for lens-shaped particles and spherocylinders

We have recently developed a mean-field theory to estimate the packing fraction of non-spherical particles [A. Baule et al., Nature Commun. (2013)]. The central quantity in this framework is the Voronoi excluded volume, which generalizes the standard hard-core excluded volume appearing in Onsager's theory. The Voronoi excluded volume is defined from an exclusion condition for the Voronoi boundary between two particles, which is usually not tractable analytically. Here, we show how the technical difficulties in calculating the Voronoi boundary can be overcome for lens-shaped particles and spherocylinders, two standard prolate and oblate shapes with rotational symmetry. By decomposing these shapes into unions and intersections of spheres analytical expressions can be obtained.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Centralities in complex networks

In network science complex systems are represented as a mathematical graphs consisting of a set of nodes representing the components and a set of edges representing their interactions. The framework of networks has led to significant advances in the understanding of the structure, formation and function of complex systems. Social and biological processes such as the dynamics of epidemics, the diffusion of information in social media, the interactions between species in ecosystems or the communication between neurons in our brains are all actively studied using dynamical models on complex networks. In all of these systems, the patterns of connections at the individual level play a fundamental role on the global dynamics and finding the most important nodes allows one to better understand and predict their behaviors. An important research effort in network science has therefore been dedicated to the development of methods allowing to find the most important nodes in networks. In this short entry, we describe network centrality measures based on the notions of network traversal they rely on. This entry aims at being an introduction to this extremely vast topic, with many contributions from several fields, and is by no means an exhaustive review of all the literature about network centralities.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Entry for the volume "Statistical and Nonlinear Physics" of the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Chakraborty, Bulbul (Ed.), Springer, 2021 Updated versio

A worldwide model for boundaries of urban settlements

The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to define urban settlements beyond their administrative boundaries through a bottom-up approach that takes into account geographical biases intrinsically associated with most societies around the world, and reflected in their different regional growing dynamics. The generality of the model allows to study the scaling laws of cities at all geographical levels: countries, continents, and the entire world. Our definition of cities is robust and holds to one of the most famous results in Social Sciences: Zipf's law. According to our results, the largest cities in the world are not in line with what was recently reported by the United Nations. For example, we find that the largest city in the world is an agglomeration of several small settlements close to each other, connecting three large settlements: Alexandria, Cairo, and Luxor. Our definition of cities opens the doors to the study of the economy of cities in a systematic way independently of arbitrary definitions that employ administrative boundaries