Epidemic Spreading in Signed SIIS Model

Abstract

The emergence of link polarity in social networks has opened up many research grounds in recent years. One direction that has received immense attention is the spreading of dynamic processes over signed networks. Having broad applications in economics, brand advertising, and social networking, research in this area is yet in its infancy. This capstone is devoted to the investigation of the interplay between opposing opinions/ideas in the presence of positive (friendly) and negative (unfriendly) social relationships in online networks. Grounded in Heider’s structural balance theory, the presented work is an improvement that accounts for the impact of both, user state and connection state on the prevalence of the spreading process. Moreover, our results are based on simulations conducted using online social network data sets that were extracted and analyzed.