Locating multiple information sources in social networks based on the naming game

Abstract

Identifying the source of information in a network plays a key role in controlling the impact of information. Herein, we study the problem of multiple source localization in the context of information propagation in social networks. We use the theory of the naming game to conduct observations. Moreover, we divide the observations into different sets based on the information provided by them and then estimate the source of each set. Finally, we combine the source of each observation set to obtain all the estimated information sources. The proposed method can locate sources without knowing the number of information sources. Simulations on four real data sets are provided to verify the performance of our method.