Information Spread in a Social Media Age

8

Stochastic Modeling of Information Spread

“We define the art of conjecture, or stochastic art, as the art of evaluating as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions we can always base ourselves on what has been found to be the best, the most appropriate, the most certain.”

Jacob Bernoulli, Ars Conjectandi, 1713

In the previous chapter, epidemiology-based deterministic models were presented and examined. At each point in time, these models assumed deterministic state values to represent the system. While considering a deterministic value for a state is very convenient in simplifying a complicated system, real-world systems for information spread (and most systems in general) are naturally probabilistic. ...