A Two-Tier Partition Algorithm for the Optimization of the Large-scale Simulation of Information Diffusion in Social Networks

• Main Authors: Bin Chen, Hailiang Chen, Dandan Ning, Mengna Zhu, Chuan Ai, Xiaogang Qiu, Weihui Dai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-05-01
• Series: Symmetry
• Subjects: social network simulation; ABMS; Spark; two-tier partition algorithm
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/5/843

As online social networks play a more and more important role in public opinion, the large-scale simulation of social networks has been focused on by many scientists from sociology, communication, informatics, and so on. It is a good way to study real information diffusion in a symmetrical simulation world by agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), which is considered an effective solution by scholars from computational sociology. However, on the one hand, classical ABMS tools such as NetLogo cannot support the simulation of more than thousands of agents. On the other hand, big data platforms such as Hadoop and Spark used to study big datasets do not provide optimization for the simulation of large-scale social networks. A two-tier partition algorithm for the optimization of large-scale simulation of social networks is proposed in this paper. First, the simulation kernel of ABMS for information diffusion is implemented based on the Spark platform. Both the data structure and the scheduling mechanism are implemented by Resilient Distributed Data (RDD) to simulate the millions of agents. Second, a two-tier partition algorithm is implemented by community detection and graph cut. Community detection is used to find the partition of high interactions in the social network. A graph cut is used to achieve the goal of load balance. Finally, with the support of the dataset recorded from Twitter, a series of experiments are used to testify the performance of the two-tier partition algorithm in both the communication cost and load balance.