A Method for Information Source Locating with Incomplete Observation of Online Social Network

Finding the information source on online social network is called information source locating. However, it is difficult because the structure of social networks is complex and the complete online social network is hard to observe. At the same time, the fact that diffusion process is asynchronous increases the difficulty. In this paper, a method based on the correlation between activated time and topology structure was proposed. Some experiments were executed and the effect of different sampling methods was analyzed. Experiments on BA, WS and Facebook show that our method can solve the source locating problem of asynchronous information diffusion with incomplete observation.