Models of Communication Dynamics for Simulation of Information Diffusion

We study information diffusion in real-life and synthetic dynamic networks, using well known threshold and cascade models of diffusion. Our test-bed is the communication network of the LiveJournal Blogosphere. We observe that the dynamic and static versions of the Blogograph, yield very different behaviors of the diffusion. It was earlier discovered that the communication dynamics of the Blogograph is quite high - over 60% of the links each week were not present in the previous week, though the size of the node set is relatively stable. Our models of the Blogograph evolution reproduce general stable statistics of the real-life Blogograph. We discover that the diffusion footprint on our models closely approximate the diffusion footprint of the real-life dynamic network.