Using friends as sensors to detect global-scale contagious outbreaks.

ABSTRACT: Recent research has focused on the monitoring of global-scale online data for improved detection of epidemics, mood patterns, movements in the stock market political revolutions, box-office revenues, consumer behaviour and many other important phenomena. However, privacy considerations and the sheer scale of data available online are quickly making global monitoring infeasible, and existing methods do not take full advantage of local network structure to identify key nodes for monitoring. Here, we develop a model of the contagious spread of information in a global-scale, publicly-articulated social network and show that a simple method can yield not just early detection, but advance warning of contagious outbreaks. In this method, we randomly choose a small fraction of nodes in the network

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Herranz M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3981694 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature