Abstract
How does reciprocal links affect the function of real social network? Does reciprocal link and non-reciprocal link play the same role? Previous researches haven't displayed a clear picture to us until now according to the best of our knowledge. Motivated by this, in this paper, we empirically study the influence of reciprocal links in two representative real datasets, Sina Weibo and Douban. Our results demonstrate that the reciprocal links play a more important role than non-reciprocal ones in information diffusion process. In particular, not only coverage but also the speed of the information diffusion can be significantly enhanced by considering the reciprocal effect. We give some possible explanations from the perspectives of network connectivity and efficiency. This work may shed some light on the in-depth understanding and application of the reciprocal effect in directed online social networks.
Highlights
Nowadays, the emergence of social networks and affiliated applications have triggered an increasing attention from various disciplines, ranging from studying the social interactions and spreading patterns in social sciences [1] to uncovering the underlying structure and dynamics in mathematics and physics [2]
There is a considerable number of theoretical models to study information diffusion on social networks [44,45,46,47,48,49,50]
In order to understand the underlying mechanisms and possible factors that would result in the information outbreaks, we adopt one variant of the classic epidemic spreading model, Susceptive-Infected (SI) model [33], to evaluate the effect of reciprocal links in the two aforementioned social networks
Summary
The emergence of social networks and affiliated applications have triggered an increasing attention from various disciplines, ranging from studying the social interactions and spreading patterns in social sciences [1] to uncovering the underlying structure and dynamics in mathematics and physics [2]. Social networks can be classified into two typical classes according to the edge properties: undirected and directed. A considerable fraction of those followees would give positive feedback and add some of their followers with similar interests as online neighbors. Such intermediate directed structure property, namely reciprocity [5], facilitates a great deal of attention from the scientific community. The power of reciprocity [11] does play a vital role in social economic systems [12] and human social organizations [13,14], and has been found wide applications in characterizing the property [15,16], maintaining the structure [17], and uncovering the underlying function of directed social networks [18,19]. The network reciprocity has received outstanding attention in the realm of (co)evolutionary games [20,21,22,23] and the evolution of cooperation [24,25,26]
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