Intervening Coupling Diffusion of Competitive Information in Online Social Networks

The vigorously rising of social media brings a new opportunity for information diffusion in online social networks. However, the existing models of information diffusion only consider the single information, such as rumor. What's more, most of intervention frameworks are modeled under the ideal circumstances without reality constraints. In this article, we propose a novel model of competitive information coupling diffusion to describe the complex process of information diffusion in online social networks. Especially, in order to intervene the process of competitive information coupling diffusion, we introduce three intervention strategies and propose an intervention framework. More importantly, we take the dynamic constraints into consideration such as the budget of intervention and current state of the system, and further propose the constrained intervention model. To reduce the system loss, we establish an optimal control problem with constraints to achieve the optimal allocation of intervention strategies over time and minimize the total loss. We theoretically prove the existence and uniqueness of the optimal solution of the problem, and derive the optimal control solution. Through the experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the model and analyze the efficiency of different intervention strategies about competitive information coupling diffusion with or without constraints, respectively. The results show that the collaborative intervention strategies can effectively impact the process of diffusion and get the minimum system loss. This article provides high realistic significance to the commercial marketing in online social networks.