Today I read a paper titled “Small But Slow World: How Network Topology and Burstiness Slow Down Spreading”
The abstract is:
Communication networks show the small-world property of short paths, but the spreading dynamics in them turns out slow
We follow the time evolution of information propagation through communication networks by using the SI model with empirical data on contact sequences
We introduce null models where the sequences are randomly shuffled in different ways, enabling us to distinguish between the contributions of different impeding effects
The slowing down of spreading is found to be caused mostly by weight-topology correlations and the bursty activity patterns of individuals