文献阅读-Inferring Networks of Diffusion and Influence

Abstract

Information diffusion and virus propagation are fundamental processes taking place in networks. While it is often possible to directly observe when nodes become infected with a virus or publish the information, observing individual transmissions (who infects whom, or who influences whom) is typically very difficult.

译文：信息扩散和病毒传播是发生在网络中的基本过程。虽然通常有可能直接观察节点何时感染病毒或发布信息，但观察个别传播(谁感染了谁，或谁影响了谁)通常非常困难。

Furthermore, in many applications, the underlying network over which the diffusions and propagations spread is actually unobserved. We tackle these challenges by developing a method for tracing paths of diffusion and influence through networks and inferring the networks over which contagions propagate.

译文：此外，在许多应用中，扩散和传播所经过的底层网络实际上是无法观察到的。我们通过开发一种方法来追踪通过网络传播和影响的路径，并推断传染传播的网络来应对这些挑战。

Given the times when nodes adopt pieces of information or become infected, we identify the optimal network that best explains the observed infection times. Since the optimization problem is NP-hard to solve exactly, we develop an efficient approximation algorithm that scales to large datasets and finds provably near-optimal networks.

译文：给定节点接收信息片段或被感染的时间，我们确定最优网络，最能解释观察到的感染时间。由于优化问题是np难以精确解决的，我们开发了一种有效的近似算法，可扩展到大型数据集并找到可证明的近最优网络。

We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by tracing information diffusion in a set of 170 million blogs and news articles over a one year period to infer how information flows through the online media space.

译文：我们通过追踪一年中1.7亿篇博客和新闻文章中的信息传播来推断信息如何在在线媒体空间中流动，从而证明了我们方法的有效性。

We find that the diffusion network of news for the top 1,000 media sites and blogs tends to have a core-periphery structure with a small set of core media sites that diffuse information to the rest of the Web. These sites tend to have stable circles of influence with more general news media sites acting as connectors between them.

译文：我们发现，前1000家媒体网站和博客的新闻传播网络倾向于具有核心-外围结构，其中一小部分核心媒体网站将信息传播到网络的其余部分。这些网站往往有稳定的影响圈，更多的一般新闻媒体网站充当它们之间的连接器。