Information Spread in a Social Media Age

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Epidemiology-Based Models for Information Spread

“To understand the Universe, you must understand the language in which it’s written, the language of Mathematics.”

Galileo Galilei

With a basic understanding of models and how models are developed, this chapter examines epidemiology models used to describe how disease is spread throughout a population, including the susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) and susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) disease spread models. The concepts of herd immunity and curve flattening are explained in the context of these epidemic models. These models are then framed as analog models that lead to several well-established information spread models based on epidemiological principles. After highlighting ...