An Epidemiological Approach to Information Propagation in the Digg Online Social Network

We propose the use of a variant of the epidemiological SIR model to accurately describe the diffusion of online content over the online social network Digg.com. We show the theoretical properties of this epidemiological model, its applications to social media spread in online social networks and how it more accurately predicts user voting behaviour over a period of 50 hours than the previously established models.