Optimal community structure for social contagions

Abstract

Community structure is an important factor in the behavior of real-world networks because it strongly affects the stability and thus the phase transition order of the spreading dynamics. We here propose a reversible social contagion model of community networks that includes the factor of social reinforcement. In our model an individual adopts a social contagion when the number of received units of information exceeds its adoption threshold. We use mean-field approximation to describe our proposed model, and the results agree with numerical simulations. The numerical simulations and theoretical analyses both indicate that there is a first-order phase transition in the spreading dynamics, and that a hysteresis loop emerges in the system when there is a variety of initially-adopted seeds. We find an optimal community structure that maximizes spreading dynamics. We also find a rich phase diagram with a triple point that separates the no-diffusion phase from the two diffusion phases.

arXiv commentAccepted by New Journal of Physics

References in corpus (27)

• Epidemic spreading in scale-free networks
• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Epidemic processes in complex networks
• The structure and dynamics of multilayer networks
• Critical phenomena in complex networks
• Statistical physics of vaccination
• Evolutionary games on multilayer networks: A colloquium
• The physics of spreading processes in multilayer networks
• Universal behavior in a generalized model of contagion
• Unification of theoretical approaches for epidemic spreading on complex networks
• Optimal network modularity for information diffusion
• Multiplexity-facilitated cascades in networks
• Analysis of complex contagions in random multiplex networks
• Dynamics of social contagions with memory of non-redundant information
• Estimating the number of communities in a network
• Threshold cascades with response heterogeneity in multiplex networks
• Threshold model of cascades in temporal networks
• Bursty communication patterns facilitate spreading in a threshold-based epidemic dynamics
• Generalized communities in networks
• Modelling diffusion of innovations in a social network
• Analysis of a threshold model of social contagion on degree-correlated networks
• Social contagions on time-varying community networks
• Interacting opinion and disease dynamics in multiplex networks: discontinuous phase transition and non-monotonic consensus times
• A Dynamic Model of Cascades on Random Networks with a Threshold Rule
• Driving interconnected networks to supercriticality
• Social contagion with degree-dependent thresholds
• A universal form of slow dynamics in zero-temperature random-field Ising model

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Coevolution spreading in complex networks
• Network Alignment
• Antivax movement and epidemic spreading in the era of social networks: Nonmonotonic effects, bistability and network segregation
• Synergistic epidemic spreading in correlated networks