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Register a new userThe Bursty Dynamics of the Twitter Information Network
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In online social media systems users are not only posting, consuming, and resharing content, but also creating new and destroying existing connections in the underlying social network. While each of these two types of dynamics has individually been studied in the past, much less is known about the connection between the two. How does user information posting and seeking behavior interact with the evolution of the underlying social network structure? Here, we study ways in which network structure reacts to users posting and sharing content. We examine the complete dynamics of the Twitter information network, where users post and reshare information while they also create and destroy connections. We find that the dynamics of network structure can be characterized by steady rates of change, interrupted by sudden bursts. Information diffusion in the form of cascades of post re-sharing often creates such sudden bursts of new connections, which significantly change users local network structure. These bursts transform users networks of followers to become structurally more cohesive as well as more homogenous in terms of follower interests. We also explore the effect of the information content on the dynamics of the network and find evidence that the appearance of new topics and real-world events can lead to significant changes in edge creations and deletions. Lastly, we develop a model that quantifies the dynamics of the network and the occurrence of these bursts as a function of the information spreading through the network. The model can successfully predict which information diffusion events will lead to bursts in network dynamics.
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Current social networks are of extremely large-scale generating tremendous information flows at every moment. How information diffuse over social networks has attracted much attention from both industry and academics. Most of the existing works on information diffusion analysis are based on machine learning methods focusing on social network structure analysis and empirical data mining. However, the dynamics of information diffusion, which are heavily influenced by network users decisions, actions and their socio-economic interactions, is generally ignored by most of existing works. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic framework to model the dynamic information diffusion process in social networks. Specifically, we derive the information diffusion dynamics in complete networks, uniform degree and non-uniform degree networks, with the highlight of two special networks, ErdH{o}s-Renyi random network and the Barabasi-Albert scale-free network. We find that the dynamics of information diffusion over these three kinds of networks are scale-free and the same with each other when the network scale is sufficiently large. To verify our theoretical analysis, we perform simulations for the information diffusion over synthetic networks and real-world Facebook networks. Moreover, we also conduct experiment on Twitter hashtags dataset, which shows that the proposed game theoretic model can well fit and predict the information diffusion over real social networks.
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