Cumulative Dynamics of Independent Information Spreading Behaviour: A Physical Perspective

Abstract

The popularization of information spreading in online social networks facilitates daily communication among people. Although much work has been done to study the effect of interactions among people on spreading, there is less work that considers the pattern of spreading behaviour when people independently make their decisions. By comparing microblogging, an important medium for information spreading, with the disordered spin glass system, we find that there exist interesting corresponding relationships between them. And the effect of aging can be observed in both systems. Based on the analogy with the Trap Model of spin glasses, we derive a model with a unified power-function form for the growth of independent spreading activities. Our model takes several key factors into consideration, including memory effect, the dynamics of human interest, and the fact that older messages are more difficult to discover. We validate our model by a real-world microblogging data set. Our work indicates that, other than various features, some invariable rules should be considered during spreading prediction. This work also contributes a useful methodology for studying human dynamics.

Bi-Polarization in Cascade Size Distributions

“…Authors in [27] indicate using Sina microblog data that the replying time after the publication of a tweet has a power-law distribution. Authors in [28] demonstrate that the cumulative number of retweets at time t after tweeting can be expressed by a power function of t. Accordingly, this study employs a power-law distribution to generate the time it takes to transmit a received message to followers.…”

“…Empirical data show that the interval between the time a user receives a tweet and the time the user responds to it has a power-law probability distribution [27], [28]. Thus, this study generates the intervals according to the truncated Pareto distribution whose cumulative distribution function (CDF) F (t) is expressed by…”