Evolutionary social information diffusion analysis

Nowadays, social networks are extremely large-scale with tremendous information flows, where understanding how the information diffuse over social networks becomes an important research issue. Most of the existing works on information diffusion analysis are based on either network structure modeling or empirical approach with dataset mining. However, the information diffusion is also heavily influenced by network users´ decisions, actions and their socio-economic connections, which is generally ignored by existing works. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic framework to model the dynamic information diffusion process in social networks. To verify our theoretical analysis, we conduct experiments by using Facebook network and real-world information spreading dataset of Memetracker. Experiment results show that the proposed game theoretic framework is effective and practical in modeling the social network users´ information forwarding behaviors.