An epidemic model for correlated information diffusion in crowd intelligence networks

Purpose: With the popularity of the internet and the increasing numbers of netizens, tremendous information flows are generated daily by the intelligently interconnected individuals. The diffusion processes of different information are not independent, and they interact with and influence each other. Modeling and analyzing the interaction between correlated information play an important role in the understanding of the characteristics of information dissemination and better control of the information flows. This paper aims to model the correlated information diffusion process over the crowd intelligence networks. Design/methodology/approach: This study extends the classic epidemic susceptible–infectious–recovered (SIR) model and proposes the SIR mixture model to describe the diffusion process of two correlated pieces of information. The whole crowd is divided into different groups with respect to their forwarding state of the correlated information, and the transition rate between different groups shows the property of each piece of information and the influences between them. Findings: The stable state of the SIR mixture model is analyzed through the linearization of the model, and the stable condition can be obtained. Real data are used to validate the SIR mixture model, and the detailed diffusion process of correlated information can be inferred by the analysis of the parameters learned through fitting the real data into the SIR mixture model. Originality/value: The proposed SIR mixture model can be used to model the diffusion of correlated information and analyze the propagation process. © 2019, Yuejiang Li, H. Vicky Zhao and Yan Chen.