Tao Zhou

The network-based cooperative information spreading is a widely existing phenomenon in the real world. For instance, the spreading of disease outbreak news and disease prevention information often coexist and interact with each other on the Internet. Promoting the cooperative spreading of information in network-based systems is a subject of great importance in both theoretical and practical perspectives. However, very limited attention has been paid to this specific research area so far. In this study, we propose an effective approach for identifying the influential latent edges which, if added to the original network, can promote the cooperative susceptible-infected-recovered dynamics. To be specific, we first obtain the probabilities of each nodes being in different node states by the message-passing approach. Then, based on the state probabilities of nodes obtained, we come up with an indicator, which incorporates both the information of network topology and the co-SIR dynamics, to measure the influence of each latent edge in promoting the co-SIR dynamics. Thus, the most influential latent edges can be located after ranking all the latent edges according to their quantified influence. We verify the rationality and superiority of the proposed indicator in identifying the influential latent edges of both synthetic and real-world networks by extensive numerical simulations. This study provides an effective approach to identify the influential latent edges for promoting the network-based co-SIR information spreading model and offers inspirations for further research on intervening the cooperative spreading dynamics from the perspective of performing network structural perturbations.

Cooperative spreading dynamics on complex networks is a hot topic in the field of network science. In this paper, we propose a strategy to immunize some nodes based on their degrees. The immunized nodes disable the synergistic effect of cooperative spreading dynamics. We also develop a generalized percolation theory to study the final state of the spreading dynamics. By using the Monte Carlo method, numerical simulations reveal that immunizing nodes with a large degree cannot always be beneficial for containing cooperative spreading. For small values of transmission probability, immunizing hubs can suppress the spreading, while the opposite situation happens for large values of transmission probability. Furthermore, numerical simulations show that immunizing hubs increase the cost of the system. Finally, all numerical simulations can be well predicted by the generalized percolation theory.