Abstract:
Many real-world processes evolve in cascades over networks, whose topologies are often unobservable and change over time. However, the so-termed adoption times when for i...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Many real-world processes evolve in cascades over networks, whose topologies are often unobservable and change over time. However, the so-termed adoption times when for instance blogs mention popular news items are typically known, and are implicitly dependent on the underlying network. To infer the network topology, a dynamic structural equation model is adopted to capture the relationship between observed adoption times and the unknown edge weights, while accounting also for external (non-topological) perturbations. Assuming a slowly time-varying topology and leveraging the sparse connectivity inherent to social networks, edge weights are estimated by minimizing a sparsity-regularized exponentially-weighted least-squares criterion. To this end, a solver is developed by leveraging (pseudo) real-time sparsity-promoting proximal gradient iterations. Numerical tests with real cascades of online media demonstrate the effectiveness of the novel algorithm in unveiling sparse dynamically-evolving topologies.
Published in: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Date of Conference: 04-09 May 2014
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 14 July 2014
Electronic ISBN:978-1-4799-2893-4