Asynchronism of the spreading dynamics underlying the bursty pattern*

Abstract

The potential mechanisms of the spreading phenomena uncover the organizations and functions of various systems. However, due to the lack of valid data, most of early works are limited to the simulated process on model networks. In this paper, we track and analyze the propagation paths of real spreading events on two social networks: Twitter and Brightkite. The empirical analysis reveals that the spreading probability and the spreading velocity present the explosive growth within a short period, where the spreading probability measures the transferring likelihood between two neighboring nodes, and the spreading velocity is the growth rate of the information in the whole network. Besides, we observe the asynchronism between the spreading probability and the spreading velocity. To explain the interesting and abnormal issue, we introduce the time-varying spreading probability into the susceptible-infected (SI) and linear threshold (LT) models. Both the analytic and experimental results reproduce the spreading phenomenon in real networks, which deepens our understandings of spreading problems.