Temporal Dynamics of Information Diffusion in Twitter: Modeling and Experimentation

Twitter constitutes an accessible platform for studying and experimenting with the dynamics of information dissemination. By exploiting this and using real data, in this paper, we study the temporal dynamics of topic-specific information spread in Twitter, where we assume that each topic corresponds to a hashtag. We develop an epidemic model for information spread in Twitter and we validate it using real data for several hashtags chosen so as to cover a variety of characteristics. Contrary to the existing works in literature, which define the informed Twitter users as those who have produced/reproduced tweets with a specific hashtag, our model considers as informed a superset of Twitter users who have seen/produced/reproduced tweets with a specific hashtag. Thus, it does not underestimate the extent of information propagation in the network. The evaluation results indicate a satisfactory performance of the proposed epidemic model for all hashtag types examined; while more importantly, they allow studying the impact of several factors, such as the need of time-varying infection rates depending on the hashtag type.