Citation cascades in blog networks are often considered as traces of information spreading on this social medium. In this work, we question this point of view using both a structural and semantic analysis of five months activity of the most representative blogs of the french-speaking community.Statistical measures reveal that our dataset shares many features with those that can be found in the literature, suggesting the existence of an identical underlying process. However, a closer analysis of the post content indicates that the popular epidemic-like descriptions of cascades are misleading in this context.A basic model, taking only into account the behavior of bloggers and their restricted social network, accounts for several important statistical features of the data.These arguments support the idea that citations primary goal may not be information spreading on the blogosphere.
In this work, we use data in which the connection between users is explicit and combine it with a popular cascade-like description of the spreading @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_20 @cite_11 @cite_0 @cite_21 . More precisely, we adopt definitions very similar to the ones developed in @cite_6 , and will therefore often refer to this study for comparison purposes. In addition to the statistical analyses of these datasets, models have been proposed to explain the observed features @cite_19 @cite_26 @cite_6 @cite_11 . Among them, many are inspired by virus spreading models in epidemiology; in the following, we address the issue of the relevance of this particular class of models in the context of blog networks.
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_20 @cite_11
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The strong analogy between biological viruses and their computational counterparts has motivated the authors to adapt the techniques of mathematical epidemiology to the study of computer virus propagation. In order to allow for the most general patterns of program sharing, a standard epidemiological model is extended by placing it on a directed graph and a combination of analysis and simulation is used to study its behavior. The conditions under which epidemics are likely to occur are determined, and, in cases where they do, the dynamics of the expected number of infected individuals are examined as a function of time. It is concluded that an imperfect defense against computer viruses can still be highly effective in preventing their widespread proliferation, provided that the infection rate does not exceed a well-defined critical epidemic threshold. > Many network phenomena are well modeled as spreads of epidemics through a network. Prominent examples include the spread of worms and email viruses, and, more generally, faults. Many types of information dissemination can also be modeled as spreads of epidemics. In this paper we address the question of what makes an epidemic either weak or potent. More precisely, we identify topological properties of the graph that determine the persistence of epidemics. In particular, we show that if the ratio of cure to infection rates is larger than the spectral radius of the graph, then the mean epidemic lifetime is of order log n, where n is the number of nodes. Conversely, if this ratio is smaller than a generalization of the isoperimetric constant of the graph, then the mean epidemic lifetime is of order e sup na , for a positive constant a. We apply these results to several network topologies including the hypercube, which is a representative connectivity graph for a distributed hash table, the complete graph, which is an important connectivity graph for BGP, and the power law graph, of which the AS-level Internet graph is a prime example. We also study the star topology and the Erdos-Renyi graph as their epidemic spreading behaviors determine the spreading behavior of power law graphs. Information cascades on social networks, such as retweet cascades on Twitter, have been often viewed as an epidemiological process, with the associated notion of virality to capture popular cascades that spread across the network. The notion of structural virality or average path length has been posited as a measure of global spread. In this paper, we argue that this simple epidemiological view, though analytically compelling, is not the entire story. We first show empirically that the classical SIR diffusion process on the Twitter graph, even with the best possible distribution of infectiousness parameter, cannot explain the nature of observed retweet cascades on Twitter. More specifically, rather than spreading further from the source as the SIR model would predict, many cascades that have several retweets from direct followers, die out quickly beyond that. We show that our empirical observations can be reconciled if we take interests of users and tweets into account. In particular, we consider a model where users have multi-dimensional interests, and connect to other users based on similarity in interests. Tweets are correspondingly labeled with interests, and propagate only in the subgraph of interested users via the SIR process. In this model, interests can be either narrow or broad, with the narrowest interest corresponding to a star graph on the interested users, with the root being the source of the tweet, and the broadest interest spanning the whole graph. We show that if tweets are generated using such a mix of interests, coupled with a varying infectiousness parameter, then we can qualitatively explain our observation that cascades die out much more quickly than is predicted by the SIR model. In the same breath, this model also explains how cascades can have large size, but low "structural virality" or average path length. With the amount of data available on social networks, new methodologies for the analysis of information are needed. Some methods allow the users to combine different types of data in order to extract relevant information. In this context, the present paper shows the application of a model via a platform in order to group together information generated by Twitter users, thus facilitating the detection of trends and data related to particular symptoms. In order to implement the model, an analyzing tool that uses the Levenshtein distance was developed, to determine exactly what is required to convert a text into the following texts: ’gripa’-”flu”, ”dolor de cabeza”-”headache”, ’dolor de estomago’”stomachache”, ’fiebre’-”fever” and ’tos’”cough” in the area of Bogota. Among the information collected, identifiable patterns emerged for each one of the texts.