Research On The Identification And Application Of The Main Paths Of Information Diffusion In Online Social Networks

A number of researches on relationship strength show that there are some socially active links in online social networks.Theoretically,if we identify the strong ties of every node based on historical interaction records and then join several ties together,it is feasible to extract the main paths of the network which play the most significant role in the process of information diffusion.Although much of previous work has focused on the pathway of a specific event,and some researchers also have proposed the concept of main path analysis in knowledge diffusion network and citation network,there are hardly any scholars that have extracted the main paths of social network.To identify the main paths of online social networks,this paper proposes a method which measures the weights of links based on historical interaction records.The influence of node is quantified based on the idea of PageRank algorithm and top-ranked nodes are selected as the influential users.The node forwarding probability is also based on historical interaction records,and the paths? importance of all reachable paths between each pair of influential users are evaluated by calculating the probability that a message would spread via this path.The top-ranked paths of the whole network will be selected as the main paths.Finally,we applied our method to China?s Sina Micro-blog network,and analyzed how to predict and control the information diffusion with the help of main path network.By extracting the main paths,we have a better understanding of the internal structure of relationship network and path characteristics of information diffusion,which would be beneficial to the early warning and intervention of macroscopic public opinion.