Information Propagation in Social Networks with Overlapping Community Structure

Many real networks exhibit overlapping community structures. Recent studies have been performed that analyze the impact of overlapping community structure on information propagation, but few of them concerned with individual behaviors. From this point of view, we propose a Markov process model to evaluate the performance of information propagation in social networks with overlapping community structures. In addition, many individual social behaviors are combined in the model. For example, individuals may exhibit selfish behaviors, such as individual and social selfishness, and people may discard the information after they have used it. The accuracy of the model is verified by simulation. Furthermore, the numerical results show that both overlapping community structure of the network and individual behaviors have a significant impact on the outbreak size and propagation speed of the information. Additionally, the overlapping community structure of the social network can reduce the impact of selfishness on information propagation.