Evolutionary Dynamics of Information Diffusion Over Social Networks

Current social networks are of extremely large-scale generating tremendous information flows at every moment. How information diffuses over social networks has attracted much attention from both industry and academics. Most of the existing works on information diffusion analysis are based on machine learning methods focusing on social network structure analysis and empirical data mining. However, the network users' decisions, actions, and socio-economic interactions are generally ignored by most of existing works. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic framework to model the dynamic information diffusion process in social networks. Specifically, we derive the information diffusion dynamics in complete networks, uniform degree, and nonuniform degree networks, with the highlight of two special networks, the Erdős–Rényi random network and the Barabási–Albert scale-free network. We find that the dynamics of information diffusion over these three kinds of networks are scale-free and all the three dynamics are same with each other when the network scale is sufficiently large. To verify our theoretical analysis, we perform simulations for the information diffusion over synthetic networks and real-world Facebook networks. Moreover, we also conduct an experiment on a Twitter hashtags dataset, which shows that the proposed game theoretic model can well fit and predict the information diffusion over real social networks.