Rumour Spreading In Community Based Networks

Abstract

Many real-world networks have the characteristic that they are comprised of distinct groups or communities whose members contain many links within the community but with fewer connections to others. It is important to accurately model these types of networks to correctly predict the outcome of important spreading processes such as disease transmission, or the flow of information etc. Our motivating example is a network of traders within several investment institutions such as hedge funds. We assume an idealised scenario where traders within the same institution have many contacts and can share information quickly and easily but have fewer contacts to traders in other institutions, relying on personal networks, allowing for information to flow easily within a community and less-so between communities. In this paper we investigate a particular spreading process, the spread of a rumour, on a community based network that is characterised by two parameters; the within-group connectivity, and the between-group connectivity. We show that such networks have different characteristics to small-world or random networks that are often used to model the types of systems and that the network topology has a small but not insignificant effect on the spread of rumours on the network.