An enriched social behavioural information diffusion model in social networks

Abstract

Online social networks have recently become an innovative and effective method for spreading information among people around the world. Information diffusion, rumour spreading and diseases infection are all instances of stochastic processes that occur over the edges of social networks. Many prior works have carried out empirical studies and diffusion models to understand how information propagates in online social networks; however they suffer from problems. In this paper, we propose an information diffusion model inspired by information propagation among people. Our proposed Social Behavioural Information Diffusion Model, abbreviated as SBIDM, considers the effect of mainstream media like TV and radio, as well as interaction with the neighbours. The advantages of our approach are four-fold. First, it models information diffusion in social networks inspired by social life, which considers the effect of aggregate social behaviour to diffuse information; second, it allows partial knowledge to be held in each individual; third, it considers the effects of social media in propagating information as well as the effects of interacting with neighbours; and last but not least, it is applicable to different types of data including synthetic and well-known real social networks like Facebook, Amazon, Epinions and DBLP. To explore the advantages of our approach, many experiments with different settings and specifications were conducted. The obtained results are very promising.