Affiliations: [a] Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
| [b]
Centre for Mobile Cloud Computing Research, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
| [c]
International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi and Kasturi Dewi Varathan, Department of Information System, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Tel.: +060379677022; Ext: -2512; E-mails: mohammedali@siswa.um.edu.my (M.A. Al-Garadi), kasturi@um.edu.my (K.D. Varathan).
Abstract: Online social networks (OSNs) portray a multi-layer of interactions through which users become a friend, information is propagated, ideas are shared, and interaction is constructed within an OSN. Identifying the most influential spreaders in a network is a significant step towards improving the use of existing resources to speed up the spread of information for application such as viral marketing or hindering the spread of information for application like virus blocking and rumor restraint. Users communications facilitated by OSNs could confront the temporal and spatial limitations of traditional communications in an exceptional way, thereby presenting new layers of social interactions, which coincides and collaborates with current interaction layers to redefine the multiplex OSN. In this paper, the effects of different topological network structure on influential spreaders identification are investigated. The results analysis concluded that improving the accuracy of influential spreaders identification in OSNs is not only by improving identification algorithms but also by developing a network topology that represents the information diffusion well. Moreover, in this paper a topological representation for an OSN is proposed which takes into accounts both multilayers interactions as well as overlaying links as weight. The measurement results are found to be more reliable when the identification algorithms are applied to proposed topological representation compared when these algorithms are applied to single layer representations.
Keywords: Online social networks, complex network, multilayer interaction, influential spreaders
