Print Email Facebook Twitter Modelling information diffusion based on Epinion Title Modelling information diffusion based on Epinion Author Dong, T. Contributor Hanjalic, A. (mentor) Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Intelligent Systems Date 2016-10-31 Abstract Online social networks have been attracted considerable attentions and provided new channels for users to share and disseminate content, products, ideas and etc on the websites. With the advent of Internet, the user activities in online social networks can be easily tracked, which provide us with a extremely large scale of online data to study the individual interaction patterns and interpersonal influence over online social network. In this work, we aim to investigate the characteristics of user rating activity contagion, by which the information can spread through network of users in Epinion online social network. Our study is based on a dataset collected from Epinion online social network, which includes not only the trust network data indicating the social graph formed by its users but also the users’ rating activity data. We analyze the social structure and confirm that the Epinion social network exhibit small-world and scale-free characteristics. We present the analysis of user rating activity data and extract the interactions between users, that indicate the spread dynamics of user activity over Epinion using a percolation process based methodology, and present the user behavior patterns observed in Epinion social network. We propose a social contagion model that is inspired from the Epinion data, which captures the unique characteristic that percolation probability along social links is dependent on the user degree property. We use the model to systematically study the propagation dynamics of user activity through the Epinion social network as well as two generated network models: scalefree network and Erdos-Renyi network on the activity dynamics to investigate the following questions: How quickly and widely does rating activity spread in Epinion social network? How social network topology influences the activity propagation process? Which type of social network can be used to best facilitate the information diffusion ? Subject online social networkinformation spreadingsocial contagion To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ed9b743c-a4ad-44be-9622-b51de5f39795 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2016 Dong, T. Files PDF thesis_final.pdf 2.81 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:ed9b743c-a4ad-44be-9622-b51de5f39795/datastream/OBJ/view