Understanding the mechanism of social tie in the propagation process of social network with communication channel

The propagation of information in online social networks plays a critical role in modern life, and thus has been studied broadly. Researchers have proposed a series of propagation models, generally, which use a single transition probability or consider factors such as content and time to describe the way how a user activates her/his neighbors. However, the research on the mechanism how social ties between users play roles in propagation process is still limited. Specifically, comprehensive summary of factors which affect user’s decision whether to share neighbor’s content was lacked in existing works, so that the existing models failed to clearly describe the process a user be activated by a neighbor. To this end, in this paper, we analyze the close correspondence between social tie in propagation process and communication channel, thus we propose to exploit the communication channel to describe the information propagation process between users, and design a social tie channel (STC) model. The model can naturally incorporate many factors affecting the information propagation through edges such as content topic and user preference, and thus can effectively capture the user behavior and relationship characteristics which indicate the property of a social tie. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on content sharing prediction between users.