Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

6-2012

Abstract

"Diffusion of items occurs in social networks due to spreading of items through word of mouth and exogenous factors. These items may be news, products, videos, advertisements or contagious viruses. When a user purchases or consumes one of such items, we say that she adopts the item and she becomes an item adopter. Previous research has studied diffusion process at both the macro and micro levels. The former models the number of item adopters in the diffusion process while the latter determines which individuals adopt item. Both macro and micro level models have their merits and limitations. In this paper, we establish a general probabilistic framework, which can be used to derive macro-level diffusion models, including the well known Bass Model (BM). Using this framework, we develop several other models considering the social network’s degree distribution coupled with the assumption of linear influence by neighboring adopters in the diffusion process. Through some evaluation on synthetic data, this paper shows that degree distribution actually changes during the diffusion process. We therefore introduce a multi-stage diffusion model to cope with variable degree distribution. By conducting experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, we show that our proposed diffusion models can recover the diffusion parameters from the observed diffusion data, which allows us to model diffusion with high accuracy."

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Publication

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

City or Country

Dublin

Copyright Owner and License

LARC

Additional URL

www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/.../4986

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