Quantum mechanical model of information sharing in social networks

Abstract

The social network plays a significant role in the exchange of information in the system. Information sharing includes the exchange of ideas, thoughts, opinions about some product, politics, etc. It is essential to find the amount of information shared between the nodes in the network. Therefore, we introduced a quantum mechanical model for information sharing in the social network. The model considers different states of network components (nodes) and encodes the state of mind of individuals in the network. The node’s importance in the information flow is evaluated through the quantum walk approach. Besides, we also consider some classical mechanics parameters like different centrality measures to find mutual information shared between a node with its neighbor through the concept of marginal entropy and joint entropy. In the end, the results of the classical approach and quantum mechanical approach are compared and analyzed for a network constructed using different network models and validated through some real-world datasets.