Influencing Message Propagation in a Social Network Using Embedded Boolean Networks: A Demonstration Using Agent‐Based Modeling

Abstract

A Boolean network is a self‐organizing construct originally developed in the field of theoretical biology to investigate the limited variety of processes within genetic networks. Our research objective is to reformulate this descriptive biological/mathematical model into an engineering approach that can be used to shape the operational state space of a targeted complex system in a desired way. We demonstrate this by coupling the state control of a Boolean network to the rules used by the agents in an agent‐based system, thereby controlling when these rules are expressed. The application presented in this paper uses an agent‐based model of the financial community network on Twitter as the target system. A Boolean network is employed to influence the propagation of information through the community by inhibiting the retweeting rule of agents with high network centrality. The results are compared against those produced by manually removing the high centrality nodes.

Reconstruct the Logical Network from the Transition Matrix

“…The Boolean network (BN) is a logical system pioneered by Kauffman in [10] for describing genetic regulatory networks. BNs provide useful modeling tools for dynamical systems whose state-variables can attain two possible values, and have attracted a considerable attention in computer networks [15], gene networks [9,11], neural networks [1,6], as well as social networks [13].…”