Title
Local-Forest Method for Superspreaders Identification in Online Social Networks
Abstract
Identifying the most influential spreaders in online social networks plays a prominent role in affecting information dissemination and public opinions. Researchers propose many effective identification methods, such as k-shell. However, these methods are usually validated by simulating propagation models, such as epidemic-like models, which rarely consider the Push-Republish mechanism with attenuation characteristic, the unique and widely-existing spreading mechanism in online social media. To address this issue, we first adopt the Push-Republish (PR) model as the underlying spreading process to check the performance of identification methods. Then, we find that the performance of classical identification methods significantly decreases in the PR model compared to epidemic-like models, especially when identifying the top 10% of superspreaders. Furthermore, inspired by the local tree-like structure caused by the PR model, we propose a new identification method, namely the Local-Forest (LF) method, and conduct extensive experiments in four real large networks to evaluate it. Results highlight that the Local-Forest method has the best performance in accurately identifying superspreaders compared with the classical methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.3390/e24091279
ENTROPY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
complex network, online social network, spreading, influential nodes
Journal
24
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
1099-4300
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yajing Hao100.34
ShaoTing Tang2101.97
Longzhao Liu300.34
Hongwei Zheng400.34
Xin Wang5018.25
Zhiming Zheng612816.80