The Social Amplifier—Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies
Abstract
This paper develops a methodology to aggregate signals in a network regarding some hidden state of the world. We argue that focusing on edges around hubs will under certain circumstances amplify the faint signals disseminating in a network, allowing for more efficient detection of that hidden state. We apply this method to detecting emergencies in mobile phone data, demonstrating that under a broad range of cases and a constraint in how many edges can be observed at a time, focusing on the egocentric networks around key hubs will be more effective than sampling random edges. We support this conclusion analytically, through simulations, and with analysis of a dataset containing the call log data from a major mobile carrier in a European nation.
- Publication:
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Journal of Statistical Physics
- Pub Date:
- August 2013
- DOI:
- 10.1007/s10955-013-0759-z
- Bibcode:
- 2013JSP...152..399A
- Keywords:
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- Network science;
- Mobile phone networks