Diffusion of Information in Social Networks

Social networks are a growing phenomenon in today’s Internet media consumption. Social networks are used to not only stay in touch with friends and family, but also to seek and receive information on specific products/services as well as social activism. Understanding and quantifying the information flow within these networks is, therefore, of great interest to individuals, groups and businesses. Several models have been proposed to describe the mechanism of spread of information. We describe these models in detail in this chapter. We then study the importance of “influencers” (nodes that have a higher influence on information spread in a network) and discuss the spread of both truthful and mis-information in a network. Methods to control the spread of mis-information through a social network is also discussed. We then discuss the inverse problem of discovering the source of any given piece of information. Both single and multi-source problems are considered.

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