Modeling of information diffusion on social networks with applications to WeChat

Traces of user activities recorded in online social networks open new possibilities to systematically understand the information diffusion process on social networks. From the online social network WeChat, we collected a large number of information cascade trees, each of which tells the spreading trajectory of a message/information such as which...

Dynamic processes on complex networks: The role of heterogeneity

In the recent decades, various dynamic process models on complex networks have been built to study the mechanisms by which an opinion, a disease or generally the information spreads in real-world networks. For example, opinion models are developed to illustrate the competition of opinions in a population, and epidemic models are used to describe...

Epidemic mitigation via awareness propagation in communication networks: The role of time scales

The participation of individuals in multi-layer networks allows for feedback between network layers, opening new possibilities to mitigate epidemic spreading. For instance, the spread of a biological disease such as Ebola in a physical contact network may trigger the propagation of the information related to this disease in a communication...

Ranking of Nodal Infection Probability in Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible Epidemic

The prevalence, which is the average fraction of infected nodes, has been studied to evaluate the robustness of a network subject to the spread of epidemics. We explore the vulnerability (infection probability) of each node in the metastable state with a given effective infection rate τ. Specifically, we investigate the ranking of the nodal...

Nonconsensus opinion model on directed networks

Dynamic social opinion models have been widely studied on undirected networks, and most of them are based on spin interaction models that produce a consensus. In reality, however, many networks such as Twitter and the World Wide Web are directed and are composed of both unidirectional and bidirectional links. Moreover, from choosing a coffee...