摘要
Social networks are fundamental media for dif- fusion of information and contagions appear at some node of the network and get propagated over the edges. Prior re- searches mainly focus on each contagion spreading indepen- dently, regardless of multiple contagions＇ interactions as they propagate at the same time. In the real world, simultaneous news and events usually have to compete for user＇s attention to get propagated. In some other cases, they can cooperate with each other and achieve more influences. In this paper, an evolutionary game theoretic framework is proposed to model the interactions among multiple con- tagions. The basic idea is that different contagions in social networks are similar to the multiple organisms in a popula- tion, and the diffusion process is as organisms interact and then evolve from one state to another. This framework statis- tically learns the payoffs as contagions interacting with each other and builds the payoff matrix. Since learning payoffs for all pairs of contagions IS almost impossible （quadratic in the number of contagions）, a contagion clustering method is proposed in order to decrease the number of parameters to fit, which makes our approach efficient and scalable. To ver- ify the proposed framework, we conduct experiments by us- ing real-world information spreading dataset of Digg. Exper- imental results show that the proposed game theoretic frame- work helps to comprehend the information diffusion process better and can predict users＇ forwarding behaviors with more accuracy than the previous studies. The analyses of evolution dynamics of contagions and evolutionarily stable strategy re- veal whether a contagion can be promoted or suppressed by others in the diffusion process.
Social networks are fundamental media for dif- fusion of information and contagions appear at some node of the network and get propagated over the edges. Prior re- searches mainly focus on each contagion spreading indepen- dently, regardless of multiple contagions＇ interactions as they propagate at the same time. In the real world, simultaneous news and events usually have to compete for user＇s attention to get propagated. In some other cases, they can cooperate with each other and achieve more influences. In this paper, an evolutionary game theoretic framework is proposed to model the interactions among multiple con- tagions. The basic idea is that different contagions in social networks are similar to the multiple organisms in a popula- tion, and the diffusion process is as organisms interact and then evolve from one state to another. This framework statis- tically learns the payoffs as contagions interacting with each other and builds the payoff matrix. Since learning payoffs for all pairs of contagions IS almost impossible （quadratic in the number of contagions）, a contagion clustering method is proposed in order to decrease the number of parameters to fit, which makes our approach efficient and scalable. To ver- ify the proposed framework, we conduct experiments by us- ing real-world information spreading dataset of Digg. Exper- imental results show that the proposed game theoretic frame- work helps to comprehend the information diffusion process better and can predict users＇ forwarding behaviors with more accuracy than the previous studies. The analyses of evolution dynamics of contagions and evolutionarily stable strategy re- veal whether a contagion can be promoted or suppressed by others in the diffusion process.
基金
This work was supported by State Key Development Program of Basic Research of China （2013CB 329605） and the National Nat- ural Science Foundation of China （Grant Nos. 61300014, 61372191）.
