Effective spreading from multiple leaders identified by percolation in social networks

Abstract: Social networks constitute a new platform for information propagation, but its success is crucially dependent on the choice of spreaders who initiate the spreading of information. In this paper, we remove edges in a network at random and the network segments into isolated clusters. The most important nodes in each cluster then form a group of influential spreaders, such that news propagating from them would lead to an extensive coverage and minimal redundancy. The method well utilizes the similarities between the pre-percolated state and the coverage of information propagation in each social cluster to obtain a set of distributed and coordinated spreaders. Our tests on the Facebook networks show that this method outperforms conventional methods based on centrality. The suggested way of identifying influential spreaders thus sheds light on a new paradigm of information propagation on social networks.