Influence prediction for continuous-time information propagation on networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of predicting the time evolution of influence, defined by the expected number of activated (infected) nodes, given a set of initially activated nodes on a propagation network. To address the significant computational challenges of this problem on large heterogeneous networks, we establish a system of differential equations governing the dynamics of probability mass functions on the state graph where each node lumps a number of activation states of the network, which can be considered as an analogue to the Fokker-Planck equation in continuous space. We provides several methods to estimate the system parameters which depend on the identities of the initially active nodes, the network topology, and the activation rates etc. The influence is then estimated by the solution of such a system of differential equations. Dependency of the prediction error on the parameter estimation is established. This approach gives rise to a class of novel and scalable algorithms that work effectively for large-scale and dense networks. Numerical results are provided to show the very promising performance in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency of this approach.