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.

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.

Network analysis of the relationships between depressive symptoms and social participation activities among Chinese older adults and its implications for nursing

Objective:Network analysis was used to explore the complex inter-relationships between social participation activities and depressive symptoms among the Chinese older population,and the differences in network structures among different genders,age groups,and urban-rural residency would be compared.Methods:Based on the 2018 wave of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey(CLHLS),12,043 people aged 65 to 105 were included.The 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression(CESD)Scale was used to assess depressive symptoms and 10 types of social participation activities were collected,including housework,tai-chi,square dancing,visiting and interacting with friends,garden work,reading newspapers or books,raising domestic animals,playing cards or mahjong,watching TV or listening to radio,and organized social activities.R 4.2.1 software was used to estimate the network model and calculate strength and bridge strength.Results:21.60%(2,601/12,043)of the participants had depressive symptoms.The total social participation score was negatively associated with depressive symptoms after adjusting for sociodemographic factors.The network of social participation and depressive symptoms showed that“D9(Inability to get going)”and“S9(Watching TV and/or listening to the radio)”had the highest strength within depressive symptoms and social participation communities,respectively,and“S1(Housework)”,“S9(Watching TV and/or listening to the radio)”,and“D5(Hopelessness)”were the most prominent bridging nodes between the two communities.Most edges linking the two communities were negative.“S5(Graden work)-D5(Hopelessness)”and“S6(Reading newspapers/books)-D4(Everything was an effort)”were the top 2 strongest negative edges.Older females had significantly denser network structures than older males.Compared to older people aged 65e80,the age group 81e105 showed higher network global strength.Conclusions:This study provides novel insights into the complex relationships between social participation and depressive symptoms.Except for doing housework,other social participation activities were found to be protective for depression levels.Different nursing strategies should be taken to prevent and alleviate depressive symptoms for different genders and older people of different ages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Effect of Technology Support for Social Network on Agricultural Technology Diffusion

[Objective] To analyze the key factor in agricultural technology diffusion- technology support, and to explore the method to quicken the diffusion of agricultural technology. [Method] The technology acquisition advantage of social network was il- lustrated by summarizing the status and characteristics of agricultural technology and technology supporting types in the process of agriculture technology diffusion. [Result] The multi-layer, complex, persistence, systematization features of agricultural technol- ogy require support and help of technology from surrounding social network to ulti- mately internalize the technology. [Conclusion] Using social networks for the technol- ogy support will be a powerful supplement to the system of agricultural technology diffusion.

Book Review:The Socially Networked Classroom:Teaching in the New Media Age

This book is greatly appreciated for its collection of various innovative activities which could be applied in different levels of technology-savvy classrooms.It is regarded as guidance to show paths for language educators to teach in digital age,although most of the teachers today are digital immigrants who "have become fascinated by and adopted many,or most aspects of the new technology are,and always will be compared to them"(Prensky,2001).They have to attempt to equip themselves with the knowledge of new media,which aims to provide the current students with their needs to become fully literate in this digital age.However,when the Internet began to arrive in schools,it was embraced by educators already seasoned in the challenges of change.

The Research on E-mail Users' Behavior of Participating in Subjects Based on Social Network Analysis

The e-mail network is a type of social network. This study analyzes user behavior in e-mail subject participation in organizations by using social network analysis. First, the Enron dataset and the position-related information of an employee are introduced, and methods for deletion of false data are presented. Next, the three-layer model(User, Subject, Keyword) is proposed for analysis of user behavior. Then, the proposed keyword selection algorithm based on a greedy approach, and the influence and propagation of an e-mail subject are defined. Finally, the e-mail user behavior is analyzed for the Enron organization. This study has considerable significance in subject recommendation and character recognition.

Social Network Information Propagation Model Based on Individual Behavior

In this paper, we discuss building an information dissemination model based on individual behavior. We analyze the individual behavior related to information dissemination and the factors that affect the sharing behavior of individuals, and we define and quantify these factors. We consider these factors as characteristic attributes and use a Bayesian classifier to classify individuals. Considering the forwarding delay characteristics of information dissemination, we present a random time generation method that simulates the delay of information dissemination. Given time and other constraints, a user might not look at all the information that his/her friends published. Therefore, this paper proposes an algorithm to predict information visibility, i.e., it estimates the probability that an individual will see the information. Based on the classification of individual behavior and combined with our random time generation and information visibility prediction method, we propose an information dissemination model based on individual behavior. The model can be used to predict the scale and speed of information propagation. We use data sets from Sina Weibo to validate and analyze the prediction methods of the individual behavior and information dissemination model based on individual behavior. A previously proposedinformation dissemination model provides the foundation for a subsequent study on the evolution of the network and social network analysis. Predicting the scale and speed of information dissemination can also be used for public opinion monitoring.

A New Evaluation Algorithm for the Influence of User in Social Network

Online social networks have gradually permeated into every aspect of people's life.As a research hotspot in social network, user influence is of theoretical and practical significant for information transmission, optimization and integration. A prominent application is a viral marketing campaign which aims to use a small number of targeted infl uence users to initiate cascades of infl uence that create a global increase in product adoption. In this paper, we analyze mainly evaluation methods of user infl uence based on IDM evaluation model, Page Rank evaluation model, use behavior model and some other popular influence evaluation models in currently social network. And then, we extract the core idea of these models to build our influence evaluation model from two aspects, relationship and activity. Finally, the proposed approach was validated on real world datasets,and the result of experiments shows that our method is both effective and stable.

An Estimation Method for Relationship Strength in Weighted Social Network Graphs

Previous works mainly focused on estimating direct relationship strength in social networks. If two users are not directly connected in a social network, there is no direct relationship. In order to estimate the relationship strength between two indirectly connected users as well as directly connected users, this paper proposes an estimation method for relationship strength in weighted social network graphs, which is based on the trust propagation strategy and the estimation of direct relationship strength. Our method considers the length of a relationship path, the number of relationship paths and the edge weights (direct relationship strength) along with a relationship path to estimate the strength of indirect relationship. Then it synthesizes the direct and indirect relationship strength to represent the strength of relationship between two users in social net- works. Thus our method can fully estimate the relationship strength between any two users in a social network no matter whether they are directly connected or not.