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The Possibility of an Epidemic Meme Analogy for Web Community Population Analysis

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Book cover Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning - IDEAL 2007 (IDEAL 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4881))

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the possibility of understanding human social interaction in web communities by analogy with a disease propagation model from epidemiology. When an article is submitted by an individual to a social web service, it is potentially influenced by other participants. The submission sometimes starts a long and argumentative chain of articles, but often does not. This complex behavior makes management of server resources difficult and a more theoretical methodology is required. This paper tries to express these complex human dynamics by analogy with infection by a virus. In this first report, by fitting an epidemiological model to Bulletin Board System (BBS) logs in terms of a numerical triple, we show that the analogy is reasonable and beneficial because the analogy can estimate the community size despite the submitter’s information alone being observable.

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Hujun Yin Peter Tino Emilio Corchado Will Byrne Xin Yao

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kubo, M., Naruse, K., Sato, H., Matubara, T. (2007). The Possibility of an Epidemic Meme Analogy for Web Community Population Analysis. In: Yin, H., Tino, P., Corchado, E., Byrne, W., Yao, X. (eds) Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning - IDEAL 2007. IDEAL 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4881. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77226-2_107

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77226-2_107

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77225-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77226-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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