Dynamic properties of rumor propagation model induced by Lévy noise on social networks

Abstract

Abstract Social networks are inevitably subject to disruptions from the physical world, such as sudden internet outages that sever local connections and impede information flow. While Gaussian white noise, commonly used to simulate stochastic disruptions, only fluctuates within a narrow range around its mean and fails to capture large-scale variations, Lévy noise can effectively compensate for this limitation. Therefore, a susceptible–infected–removed rumor propagation model with Lévy noise is constructed on homogeneous and heterogeneous networks, respectively. Then, the existence of a global positive solution and the asymptotic path-wise of the solution are derived on heterogeneous networks, and the sufficient conditions of rumor extinction and persistence are investigated. Subsequently, theoretical results are verified through numerical calculations and the sensitivity analysis related to the threshold is conducted on the model parameters. Through simulation experiments on Watts–Strogatz (WS) and Barabási–Albert networks, it is found that the addition of noise can inhibit the spread of rumors, resulting in a stochastic resonance phenomenon, and the optimal noise intensity is obtained on the WS network. The validity of the model is verified on three real datasets by particle swarm optimization algorithm.