Global and local community memberships for estimating spreading capability of nodes in social networks

Abstract

The analysis of spreading processes within complex networks can offer many important insights for the application in contexts such as epidemics, information dissemination or rumours. Particularly, structural factors of the network which either contribute or hinder the spreading are of interest, as they can be used to control or predict such processes. In social networks, the community structure is especially relevant, as actors usually participate in different densely connected social groups which emerge from various contexts, potentially allowing them to inject the spreading process into many different communities quickly. This paper extends our recent findings on the community membership of nodes and how it can be used to predict their individual spreading capability (Krukowski & Hecking, 2020) by further evaluating it on additional networks (both real-world networks and artificially generated networks), while additionally introducing a new local measure to identify influential spreaders that—in contrast to most other measures, does not rely on knowledge of the global network structure. The results confirm our recent findings, showing that the community membership of nodes can be used as a predictor for their spreading capability, while also showing that especially the local measure proves to be a good predictor, effectively outperforming the global measure in many cases. The results are discussed with regard to real-world use cases, where knowledge of the global structure is often not given, yet a prediction regarding the spreading capability highly desired (e.g., contact-tracing apps).