Paper abstract

Effective Visualization of Information Diffusion Process over Complex Networks

Kazumi Saito - University of Shizuoka, Japan
Masahiro Kimura - Ryukoku University, Japan
Hiroshi Motoda - Osaka University, Japan

Session: Social Networks
Springer Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87481-2_22

Effective visualization is vital for understanding a complex network, in particular its dynamical aspect such as information diffusion process. Existing node embedding methods are all based solely on the network topology and sometimes produce counter-intuitive visualization. A new node embedding method based on conditional probability is proposed that explicitly addresses diffusion process using either the IC or LT models as a cross-entropy minimization problem, together with two label assignment strategies that can be simultaneously adopted. Numerical experiments were performed on two large real networks, one represented by a directed graph and the other by an undirected graph. The results clearly demonstrate the advantage of the proposed methods over conventional spring model and topology-based cross-entropy methods, especially for the case of directed networks.