Impact of different interaction behavior on epidemic spreading in time-dependent social networks

We investigate the impact of pairwise and group interactions on the spread of epidemics through an activity-driven model based on time-dependent networks.The effects of pairwise/group interaction proportion and pairwise/group interaction intensity are explored by extensive simulation and theoretical analysis.It is demonstrated that altering the group interaction proportion can either hinder or enhance the spread of epidemics,depending on the relative social intensity of group and pairwise interactions.As the group interaction proportion decreases,the impact of reducing group social intensity diminishes.The ratio of group and pairwise social intensity can affect the effect of group interaction proportion on the scale of infection.A weak heterogeneous activity distribution can raise the epidemic threshold,and reduce the scale of infection.These results benefit the design of epidemic control strategy.

Social Robot Detection Method with Improved Graph Neural Networks

Social robot accounts controlled by artificial intelligence or humans are active in social networks,bringing negative impacts to network security and social life.Existing social robot detection methods based on graph neural networks suffer from the problem of many social network nodes and complex relationships,which makes it difficult to accurately describe the difference between the topological relations of nodes,resulting in low detection accuracy of social robots.This paper proposes a social robot detection method with the use of an improved neural network.First,social relationship subgraphs are constructed by leveraging the user’s social network to disentangle intricate social relationships effectively.Then,a linear modulated graph attention residual network model is devised to extract the node and network topology features of the social relation subgraph,thereby generating comprehensive social relation subgraph features,and the feature-wise linear modulation module of the model can better learn the differences between the nodes.Next,user text content and behavioral gene sequences are extracted to construct social behavioral features combined with the social relationship subgraph features.Finally,social robots can be more accurately identified by combining user behavioral and relationship features.By carrying out experimental studies based on the publicly available datasets TwiBot-20 and Cresci-15,the suggested method’s detection accuracies can achieve 86.73%and 97.86%,respectively.Compared with the existing mainstream approaches,the accuracy of the proposed method is 2.2%and 1.35%higher on the two datasets.The results show that the method proposed in this paper can effectively detect social robots and maintain a healthy ecological environment of social networks.

CRB:A new rumor blocking algorithm in online social networks based on competitive spreading model and influence maximization

The virtuality and openness of online social platforms make networks a hotbed for the rapid propagation of various rumors.In order to block the outbreak of rumor,one of the most effective containment measures is spreading positive information to counterbalance the diffusion of rumor.The spreading mechanism of rumors and effective suppression strategies are significant and challenging research issues.Firstly,in order to simulate the dissemination of multiple types of information,we propose a competitive linear threshold model with state transition(CLTST)to describe the spreading process of rumor and anti-rumor in the same network.Subsequently,we put forward a community-based rumor blocking(CRB)algorithm based on influence maximization theory in social networks.Its crucial step is to identify a set of influential seeds that propagate anti-rumor information to other nodes,which includes community detection,selection of candidate anti-rumor seeds and generation of anti-rumor seed set.Under the CLTST model,the CRB algorithm has been compared with six state-of-the-art algorithms on nine online social networks to verify the performance.Experimental results show that the proposed model can better reflect the process of rumor propagation,and review the propagation mechanism of rumor and anti-rumor in online social networks.Moreover,the proposed CRB algorithm has better performance in weakening the rumor dissemination ability,which can select anti-rumor seeds in networks more accurately and achieve better performance in influence spread,sensitivity analysis,seeds distribution and running time.

Identifying influential spreaders in social networks: A two-stage quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization with Lévy flight

The influence maximization problem aims to select a small set of influential nodes, termed a seed set, to maximize their influence coverage in social networks. Although the methods that are based on a greedy strategy can obtain good accuracy, they come at the cost of enormous computational time, and are therefore not applicable to practical scenarios in large-scale networks. In addition, the centrality heuristic algorithms that are based on network topology can be completed in relatively less time. However, they tend to fail to achieve satisfactory results because of drawbacks such as overlapped influence spread. In this work, we propose a discrete two-stage metaheuristic optimization combining quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization with Lévy flight to identify a set of the most influential spreaders. According to the framework,first, the particles in the population are tasked to conduct an exploration in the global solution space to eventually converge to an acceptable solution through the crossover and replacement operations. Second, the Lévy flight mechanism is used to perform a wandering walk on the optimal candidate solution in the population to exploit the potentially unidentified influential nodes in the network. Experiments on six real-world social networks show that the proposed algorithm achieves more satisfactory results when compared to other well-known algorithms.

Habits on Social Networks at Workplace: A Survey of Motivations and Behaviour

This article explores the use of social networks by workers in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, with particular emphasis on a descriptive or quantitative analysis aimed at understanding motivations and methods of use. More than five hundred and fifty questionnaires were distributed, highlighting workers’ preferred digital channels and platforms. The results indicate that the majority use social media through their mobile phones, with WhatsApp being the most popular app, followed by Facebook and LinkedIn. The study reveals that workers use social media for entertainment purposes and to develop professional and social relationships, with 55% unable to live without social media at work for recreational activities. In addition, 35% spend on average 1 to 2 hours on social networks, mainly between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. It also appears that 46% believe that social networks moderately improve their productivity. These findings can guide marketing strategies, training, technology development and government policies related to the use of social media in the workplace.

Citation and bibliographic coupling between authors in the field of social network analysis

Purpose:We analyzed the structure of a community of authors working in the field of social network analysis(SNA)based on citation indicators:direct citation and bibliographic coupling metrics.We observed patterns at the micro,meso,and macro levels of analysis.Design/methodology/approach:We used bibliometric network analysis,including the“temporal quantities”approach proposed to study temporal networks.Using a two-mode network linking publications with authors and a one-mode network of citations between the works,we constructed and analyzed the networks of citation and bibliographic coupling among authors.We used an iterated saturation data collection approach.Findings:At the macro-level,we observed the global structural features of citations between authors,showing that 80%of authors have not more than 15 citations from other works.At the meso-level,we extracted the groups of authors citing each other and similar to each other according to their citation patterns.We have seen a division of authors in SNA into groups of social scientists and physicists,as well as into other groups of authors from different disciplines.We found some examples of brokerage between different groups that maintained the common identity of the field.At the micro-level,we extracted authors with extremely high values of received citations,who can be considered as the most prominent authors in the field.We examined the temporal properties of the most popular authors.Research limitations:The main challenge in this approach is the resolution of the author’s name(synonyms and homonyms).We faced the author disambiguation,or“multiple personalities”(Harzing,2015)problem.To remain consistent and comparable with our previously published articles,we used the same SNA data collected up to 2018.The analysis and conclusions on the activity,productivity,and visibility of the authors are relative only to the field of SNA.Practical implications:The proposed approach can be utilized for similar objectives and identifying key structures and characteristics in other disciplines.This may potentially inspire the application of network approaches in other research areas,creating more authors collaborating in the field of SNA.Originality/value:We identified and applied an innovative approach and methods to study the structure of scientific communities,which allowed us to get the findings going beyond those obtained with other methods.We used a new approach to temporal network analysis,which is an important addition to the analysis as it provides detailed information on different measures for the authors and pairs of authors over time.

Deep Learning Social Network Access Control Model Based on User Preferences

A deep learning access controlmodel based on user preferences is proposed to address the issue of personal privacy leakage in social networks.Firstly,socialusers andsocialdata entities are extractedfromthe social networkandused to construct homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs.Secondly,a graph neural networkmodel is designed based on user daily social behavior and daily social data to simulate the dissemination and changes of user social preferences and user personal preferences in the social network.Then,high-order neighbor nodes,hidden neighbor nodes,displayed neighbor nodes,and social data nodes are used to update user nodes to expand the depth and breadth of user preferences.Finally,a multi-layer attention network is used to classify user nodes in the homogeneous graph into two classes:allow access and deny access.The fine-grained access control problem in social networks is transformed into a node classification problem in a graph neural network.The model is validated using a dataset and compared with other methods without losing generality.The model improved accuracy by 2.18%compared to the baseline method GraphSAGE,and improved F1 score by 1.45%compared to the baseline method,verifying the effectiveness of the model.

Predicting Users’ Latent Suicidal Risk in Social Media: An Ensemble Model Based on Social Network Relationships

Suicide has become a critical concern,necessitating the development of effective preventative strategies.Social media platforms offer a valuable resource for identifying signs of suicidal ideation.Despite progress in detecting suicidal ideation on social media,accurately identifying individuals who express suicidal thoughts less openly or infrequently poses a significant challenge.To tackle this,we have developed a dataset focused on Chinese suicide narratives from Weibo’s Tree Hole feature and introduced an ensemble model named Text Convolutional Neural Network based on Social Network relationships(TCNN-SN).This model enhances predictive performance by leveraging social network relationship features and applying correction factors within a weighted linear fusion framework.It is specifically designed to identify key individuals who can help uncover hidden suicidal users and clusters.Our model,assessed using the bespoke dataset and benchmarked against alternative classification approaches,demonstrates superior accuracy,F1-score and AUC metrics,achieving 88.57%,88.75%and 94.25%,respectively,outperforming traditional TextCNN models by 12.18%,10.84%and 10.85%.We assert that our methodology offers a significant advancement in the predictive identification of individuals at risk,thereby contributing to the prevention and reduction of suicide incidences.

Evolution and Governance of the Structure of Marine Economic Networks in China’s Coastal Areas: Based on Sea-related A-share Listed Companies

Data on discrete,isolated attributes of the marine economy are often used in traditional marine economic research.However,as the focus of urban research shifts from internal static attributes to external dynamic linkages,the importance of marine economic net-work research is beginning to emerge.The construction of the marine economic network in China’s coastal areas is necessary to change the flow of land and sea resources and optimize regional marine economic development.Employing data from headquarters and branches of sea-related A-share listed enterprises to construct the marine economic network in China,we use social network analysis(SNA)to discuss the characteristics of its evolution as of 2010,2015,and 2020 and its governance.The following results were obtained.1)In terms of topological characteristics,the scale of the marine economic network in China’s coastal areas has accelerated and expan-ded,and the connections have become increasingly close;thus,this development has complex network characteristics.2)In terms of spatial structure,the intensity of the connection fluctuates and does not form stable development support;the group structure gradually becomes clear,but the overall pattern is fragmented;there are spatial differences in marine economic agglomeration radiation;the radi-ation effect of the eastern marine economic circle is obvious;and the polarization effect of northern and southern marine economic circles is significant.On this basis,we construct a framework for the governance of a marine economic network with the market,the government,and industry as the three governing bodies.By clarifying the driving factors and building objectives of marine economic network construction,this study aims to foster the high-quality development of China’s marine economy.

Opinion consensus incorporating higher-order interactions in individual-collective networks

In the current information society, the dissemination mechanisms and evolution laws of individual or collective opinions and their behaviors are the research hot topics in the field of opinion dynamics. First, in this paper, a two-layer network consisting of an individual-opinion layer and a collective-opinion layer is constructed, and a dissemination model of opinions incorporating higher-order interactions(i.e. OIHOI dissemination model) is proposed. Furthermore, the dynamic equations of opinion dissemination for both individuals and groups are presented. Using Lyapunov's first method,two equilibrium points, including the negative consensus point and positive consensus point, and the dynamic equations obtained for opinion dissemination, are analyzed theoretically. In addition, for individual opinions and collective opinions,some conditions for reaching negative consensus and positive consensus as well as the theoretical expression for the dissemination threshold are put forward. Numerical simulations are carried to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results, as well as the influence of the intra-structure, inter-connections, and higher-order interactions on the dissemination and evolution of individual opinions. The main results are as follows.(i) When the intra-structure of the collective-opinion layer meets certain characteristics, then a negative or positive consensus is easier to reach for individuals.(ii) Both negative consensus and positive consensus perform best in mixed type of inter-connections in the two-layer network.(iii) Higher-order interactions can quickly eliminate differences in individual opinions, thereby enabling individuals to reach consensus faster.

A Large-Scale Group Decision Making Model Based on Trust Relationship and Social Network Updating

With the development of big data and social computing,large-scale group decisionmaking(LGDM)is nowmerging with social networks.Using social network analysis(SNA),this study proposes an LGDM consensus model that considers the trust relationship among decisionmakers(DMs).In the process of consensusmeasurement:the social network is constructed according to the social relationship among DMs,and the Louvain method is introduced to classify social networks to form subgroups.In this study,the weights of each decision maker and each subgroup are computed by comprehensive network weights and trust weights.In the process of consensus improvement:A feedback mechanism with four identification and two direction rules is designed to guide the consensus of the improvement process.Based on the trust relationship among DMs,the preferences are modified,and the corresponding social network is updated to accelerate the consensus.Compared with the previous research,the proposedmodel not only allows the subgroups to be reconstructed and updated during the adjustment process,but also improves the accuracy of the adjustment by the feedbackmechanism.Finally,an example analysis is conducted to verify the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method.Moreover,compared with previous studies,the superiority of the proposed method in solving the LGDM problem is highlighted.

A Privacy Preservation Method for Attributed Social Network Based on Negative Representation of Information

Due to the presence of a large amount of personal sensitive information in social networks,privacy preservation issues in social networks have attracted the attention of many scholars.Inspired by the self-nonself discrimination paradigmin the biological immune system,the negative representation of information indicates features such as simplicity and efficiency,which is very suitable for preserving social network privacy.Therefore,we suggest a method to preserve the topology privacy and node attribute privacy of attribute social networks,called AttNetNRI.Specifically,a negative survey-based method is developed to disturb the relationship between nodes in the social network so that the topology structure can be kept private.Moreover,a negative database-based method is proposed to hide node attributes,so that the privacy of node attributes can be preserved while supporting the similarity estimation between different node attributes,which is crucial to the analysis of social networks.To evaluate the performance of the AttNetNRI,empirical studies have been conducted on various attribute social networks and compared with several state-of-the-art methods tailored to preserve the privacy of social networks.The experimental results show the superiority of the developed method in preserving the privacy of attribute social networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of the topology disturbing and attribute hiding parts.The experimental results show the superiority of the developed methods in preserving the privacy of attribute social networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of the topological interference and attribute-hiding components.

Location Prediction from Social Media Contents using Location Aware Attention LSTM Network

Location prediction in social media,a growing research field,employs machine learning to identify users' locations from their online activities.This technology,useful in targeted advertising and urban planning,relies on natural language processing to analyze social media content and understand the temporal dynamics and structures of social networks.A key application is predicting a Twitter user's location from their tweets,which can be challenging due to the short and unstructured nature of tweet text.To address this challenge,the research introduces a novel machine learning model called the location-aware attention LSTM(LAA-LSTM).This hybrid model combines a Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM) network with an attention mechanism.The LSTM is trained on a dataset of tweets,and the attention network focuses on extracting features related to latitude and longitude,which are crucial for pinpointing the location of a user's tweet.The result analysis shows approx.10% improvement in accuracy over other existing machine learning approaches.

Discrete Choice Analysis of Temporal Factors on Social Network Growth

Social networks like Facebook, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn provide an interaction and communication environment for users to generate and share content, allowing for the observation of social behaviours in the digital world. These networks can be viewed as a collection of nodes and edges, where users and their interactions are represented as nodes and the connections between them as edges. Understanding the factors that contribute to the formation of these edges is important for studying network structure and processes. This knowledge can be applied to various areas such as identifying communities, recommending friends, and targeting online advertisements. Several factors, including node popularity and friends-of-friends relationships, influence edge formation and network growth. This research focuses on the temporal activity of nodes and its impact on edge formation. Specifically, the study examines how the minimum age of friends-of-friends edges and the average age of all edges connected to potential target nodes influence the formation of network edges. Discrete choice analysis is used to analyse the combined effect of these temporal factors and other well-known attributes like node degree (i.e., the number of connections a node has) and network distance between nodes. The findings reveal that temporal properties have a similar impact as network proximity in predicting the creation of links. By incorporating temporal features into the models, the accuracy of link prediction can be further improved.

An Influence Maximization Algorithm Based on Improved K-Shell in Temporal Social Networks

Influence maximization of temporal social networks(IMT)is a problem that aims to find the most influential set of nodes in the temporal network so that their information can be the most widely spread.To solve the IMT problem,we propose an influence maximization algorithm based on an improved K-shell method,namely improved K-shell in temporal social networks(KT).The algorithm takes into account the global and local structures of temporal social networks.First,to obtain the kernel value Ks of each node,in the global scope,it layers the network according to the temporal characteristic of nodes by improving the K-shell method.Then,in the local scope,the calculation method of comprehensive degree is proposed to weigh the influence of nodes.Finally,the node with the highest comprehensive degree in each core layer is selected as the seed.However,the seed selection strategy of KT can easily lose some influential nodes.Thus,by optimizing the seed selection strategy,this paper proposes an efficient heuristic algorithm called improved K-shell in temporal social networks for influence maximization(KTIM).According to the hierarchical distribution of cores,the algorithm adds nodes near the central core to the candidate seed set.It then searches for seeds in the candidate seed set according to the comprehensive degree.Experiments showthatKTIMis close to the best performing improved method for influence maximization of temporal graph(IMIT)algorithm in terms of effectiveness,but runs at least an order of magnitude faster than it.Therefore,considering the effectiveness and efficiency simultaneously in temporal social networks,the KTIM algorithm works better than other baseline algorithms.

A Parallel Approach for Sentiment Analysis on Social Networks Using Spark

The public is increasingly using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to express their views on a variety of topics.As a result,social media has emerged as the most effective and largest open source for obtaining public opinion.Single node computational methods are inefficient for sentiment analysis on such large datasets.Supercomputers or parallel or distributed proces-sing are two options for dealing with such large amounts of data.Most parallel programming frameworks,such as MPI(Message Processing Interface),are dif-ficult to use and scale in environments where supercomputers are expensive.Using the Apache Spark Parallel Model,this proposed work presents a scalable system for sentiment analysis on Twitter.A Spark-based Naive Bayes training technique is suggested for this purpose;unlike prior research,this algorithm does not need any disk access.Millions of tweets have been classified using the trained model.Experiments with various-sized clusters reveal that the suggested strategy is extremely scalable and cost-effective for larger data sets.It is nearly 12 times quicker than the Map Reduce-based model and nearly 21 times faster than the Naive Bayes Classifier in Apache Mahout.To evaluate the framework’s scalabil-ity,we gathered a large training corpus from Twitter.The accuracy of the classi-fier trained with this new dataset was more than 80%.

Venture Capital Syndication under Social Network Theory:Literature Review and Prospect

As an important channel for start-ups to obtain R&D funds and external knowledge and information resources,and as one of the key methods for investment institutions to leverage scale and synergy effects to enhance investment returns,venture capital syndication holds significant research value in the field of venture capital.This paper reviews the literature,summarizing the motivations behind the formation of joint investment networks,the conceptual characteristics of the three core theories of social network theory,and the empirical research on venture capital syndication within the framework of social network theory.It also highlights the existing research results,identifies gaps,and anticipates future research directions.

Decentralized content sharing in mobile ad-hoc networks:A survey

The evolution of smart mobile devices has significantly impacted the way we generate and share contents and introduced a huge volume of Internet traffic.To address this issue and take advantage of the short-range communication capabilities of smart mobile devices,the decentralized content sharing approach has emerged as a suitable and promising alternative.Decentralized content sharing uses a peer-to-peer network among colocated smart mobile device users to fulfil content requests.Several articles have been published to date to address its different aspects including group management,interest extraction,message forwarding,participation incentive,and content replication.This survey paper summarizes and critically analyzes recent advancements in decentralized content sharing and highlights potential research issues that need further consideration.

Overlapping community‐based particle swarm optimization algorithm for influence maximization in social networks

Influence maximization,whose aim is to maximise the expected number of influenced nodes by selecting a seed set of k influential nodes from a social network,has many applications such as goods advertising and rumour suppression.Among the existing influence maximization methods,the community‐based ones can achieve a good balance between effectiveness and efficiency.However,this kind of algorithm usually utilise the network community structures by viewing each node as a non‐overlapping node.In fact,many nodes in social networks are overlapping ones,which play more important role in influence spreading.To this end,an overlapping community‐based particle swarm opti-mization algorithm named OCPSO for influence maximization in social networks,which can make full use of overlapping nodes,non‐overlapping nodes,and their interactive information is proposed.Specifically,an overlapping community detection algorithm is used to obtain the information of overlapping community structures,based on which three novel evolutionary strategies,such as initialisation,mutation,and local search are designed in OCPSO for better finding influential nodes.Experimental results in terms of influence spread and running time on nine real‐world social networks demonstrate that the proposed OCPSO is competitive and promising comparing to several state‐of‐the‐arts(e.g.CGA,CMA‐IM,CIM,CDH‐SHRINK,CNCG,and CFIN).

Maximizing Influence in Temporal Social Networks:A Node Feature-Aware Voting Algorithm

Influence Maximization(IM)aims to select a seed set of size k in a social network so that information can be spread most widely under a specific information propagation model through this set of nodes.However,most existing studies on the IM problem focus on static social network features,while neglecting the features of temporal social networks.To bridge this gap,we focus on node features reflected by their historical interaction behavior in temporal social networks,i.e.,interaction attributes and self-similarity,and incorporate them into the influence maximization algorithm and information propagation model.Firstly,we propose a node feature-aware voting algorithm,called ISVoteRank,for seed nodes selection.Specifically,before voting,the algorithm sets the initial voting ability of nodes in a personalized manner by combining their features.During the voting process,voting weights are set based on the interaction strength between nodes,allowing nodes to vote at different extents and subsequently weakening their voting ability accordingly.The process concludes by selecting the top k nodes with the highest voting scores as seeds,avoiding the inefficiency of iterative seed selection in traditional voting-based algorithms.Secondly,we extend the Independent Cascade(IC)model and propose the Dynamic Independent Cascade(DIC)model,which aims to capture the dynamic features in the information propagation process by combining node features.Finally,experiments demonstrate that the ISVoteRank algorithm has been improved in both effectiveness and efficiency compared to baseline methods,and the influence spread through the DIC model is improved compared to the IC model.