Computational Network Science

Chapter 6

Diffusion and Contagion

Abstract

Patterns of information and reference spread in networks are covered in this chapter. Percolation model is presented followed by common disease epidemic models. Latter parts of this chapter outline communities as subnetworks and methods for their identification. Micronetworks such as R&D units spanning across organizations are important informal subnetwork communities that yield much benefit to their organizations. Since they are often formed as needed, these micronetworks go undetected and community detection is useful. Node-based model is one of those models that finds other nodes that have a certain strong similarity to a node of interest. Exercises suggest analysis of common networks for diffusion ...