6/4/2017 The Emerging Science of Superspreaders (And How to Tell If You're One Of Them) - MIT Technology Review

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The Emerging Science of Superspreaders

(And How to Tell If You're One Of Them)
Nobody has gured out how to spot the most inuential spreaders of information
in a real-world network. Now that looks set to change with important implications,
not least for the superspreaders themselves.

May 13, 2014

ho are the most inuential spreaders of information on a

W network? Thats a question that marketers, bloggers, news
services and even governments would like answered. Not
least because the answer could provide ways to promote products
quickly, to boost the popularity of political parties above their rivals and
to seed the rapid spread of news and opinions.

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So its not surprising that network theorists have spent some time
thinking about how best to identify these people and to check how the
information they receive might spread around a network. Indeed,
theyve found a number of measures that spot so-called superspreaders,
people who spread information, ideas or even disease more eciently
than anybody else.

But theres a problem. Social networks are so complex that network

scientists have never been able to test their ideas in the real worldit
has always been too dicult to reconstruct the exact structure of Twitter
or Facebook networks, for example. Instead, theyve created models that
mimic real networks in certain ways and tested their ideas on these
instead.

But there is growing evidence that information does not spread through
real networks in the same way as it does through these idealised ones.
People tend to pass on information only when they are interested in a

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topic and when they are active, factors that are hard to take into account
in a purely topological model of a network.

So the question of how to nd the superspreaders remains open. That

looks set to change thanks to the work of Sen Pei at Beihang University
in Beijing and a few pals who have performed the rst study of
superspreaders on real networks.

These guys have studied the way information ows around various
networks ranging from the Livejournal blogging network to the network
of scientic publishing at the American Physical Societys, as well as on
subsets of the Twitter and Facebook networks. And theyve discovered
the key indicator that identies superspreaders in these networks.

In the past, network scientists have developed a number of

mathematical tests to measure the inuence that individuals have on the
spread of information through a network. For example, one measure is
simply the number of connections a person has to other people in the
network, a property known as their degree. The thinking is that the
most highly connected people are the best at spreading information.

Another measure uses the famous PageRank algorithm that Google

developed for ranking webpages. This works by ranking somebody more
highly if they are connected to other highly ranked people.

Then there is betweenness centrality , a measure of how many of the

shortest paths across a network pass through a specic individual. The
idea is that these people are more able to inject information into the
network.

And nally there is a property of nodes in a network known as their k-

core. This is determined by iteratively pruning the peripheries of a
network to see what is left. The k-core is the step at which that node or

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person is pruned from the network. Obviously, the most highly

connected survive this process the longest and have the highest k-core
score..

The question that Sen and co set out to answer was which of these
measures best picked out superspreaders of information in real
networks.

They began with LiveJournal, a network of blogs in which individuals

maintain lists of friends that represent social ties to other LiveJournal
users. This network allows people to repost information from other
blogs and to use a reference that links back to the original post. This
allows Sen and co to recreate not only the network of social links
between LiveJournal users but also the way in which information is
spread between them.

Sen and co collected all of the blog posts from February 2010 to
November 2011, a total of more than 56 million posts. Of these, some
600,000 contain links to other posts published by LiveJournal users.

The data reveals two important properties of information diusion.

First, only some 250,000 users are actively involved in spreading
information. Thats a small fraction of the total.

More signicantly, they found that information did not always diuse
across the social network. The found that information could spread
between two LiveJournal users even though they have no social
connection.

Thats probably because they nd this information outside of the

LiveJournal ecosystem, perhaps through web searches or via other
networks. Only 31.93% of the spreading posts can be attributed to the
observable social links, they say.

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Thats in stark contrast to the assumptions behind many social network

models. These simulate the way information ows by assuming that it
travels directly through the network from one person to another, like a
disease spread by physical contact.

The work of Sen and co suggests that inuences outside the network are
crucial too. In practice, information often spreads via several seemingly
independent sources within the network at the same time. This has
important implications for the way superspreaders can be spotted.

Sen and co say that a persons degree the number of other people he or
her are connected to is not as good a predictor of information diusion
as theorists have thought. We nd that the degree of the user is not a
reliable predictor of inuence in all circumstances, they say.

Whats more, the Pagerank algorithm is often ineective in this kind of

network as well. Contrary to common belief, although PageRank is
eective in ranking web pages, there are many situations where it fails
to locate superspreaders of information in reality, they say.

By contrast, the k-core property is a relatively good at nding

superspreaders. We consistently nd that the best spreaders are located
in the k-core, they say.

Whats interesting here is that Sen and co found similar results when
they examined the network of scientic dissemination in journals of the
American Physical Society as well as in subsets of the networks on
Twitter and Facebook. Users of all these dierent networks showed the
same information-spreading behaviour.

But before you conclude that the problem of nding superspreaders is

now solved, there is an additional factor that needs to be taken into
account. The k-core measure is a global property of the networkit can

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only be calculated by taking into account the structure of entire

network.

Thats not so convenient when it comes to large networks, such as

Facebook and Twitter, which are also the most valuable for marketers,
politicians and so on.

So Sen and co have developed yet another measure of inuence which

works almost as well as the k-core measure but is much easier to
calculate using on subsets of the entire network.

Their method is to sum the degrees of a persons nearest neighbours and

say this is almost as good as the k-core score at predicting
superspreaders.

In other words, take each of your closest friends, count the number of
connections they have and then add them all together. If your closest
friends are all highly connected, the chances are that you are a
superspreader.

If so, there are a few people whod like to get to know you better
marketers, politicians, governments and so on. With superspreaders
being such valuable commodities, itll be interesting to see how the
market for them and their services evolves.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1405.1790 : Searching For Superspreaders Of

Information In Real-World Social Media

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