Generating Simple Directed Social Network Graphs for Information Spreading

Online social networks are a dominant medium in everyday life to stay in contact with friends and to share information. In Twitter, users can connect with other users by following them, who in turn can follow back. In recent years, researchers studied several properties of social networks and designed random graph models to describe them. Many of these approaches either focus on the generation of undirected graphs or on the creation of directed graphs without modeling the dependencies between reciprocal (i.e., two directed edges of opposite direction between two nodes) and directed edges. We propose an approach to generate directed social network graphs that creates reciprocal and directed edges and considers the correlation between the respective degree sequences. Our model relies on crawled directed graphs in Twitter, on which information w.r.t. a topic is exchanged or disseminated. While these graphs exhibit a high clustering coefficient and small average distances between random node pairs (which is typical in real-world networks), their degree sequences seem to follow a χ2-distribution rather than power law. To achieve high clustering coefficients, we apply an edge rewiring procedure that preserves the node degrees. We compare the crawled and the created graphs, and simulate certain algorithms for information dissemination and epidemic spreading on them. The results show that the created graphs exhibit very similar topological and algorithmic properties as the real-world graphs, providing evidence that they can be used as surrogates in social network analysis. Furthermore, our model is highly scalable, which enables us to create graphs of arbitrary size with almost the same properties as the corresponding real-world networks.