Understanding the impact of network structure on propagation dynamics based on mobile big data

Understanding the propagation dynamics of information/an epidemic on complex networks is very important for discovering and controlling a terrorist attack, and even for predicting a disease outbreak. As an effective method, with analyzing the structure of a propagation network, a large number of previous studies have analyzed the propagation dynamics. Most of these studies are based on a special network structure to make such analysis. However, a propagation network has dynamically changed structure during the propagation. How to track, recognize and model such dynamic change is a big challenge. Along with the popularity of smart devices and the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), massive mobile data is automatically collected. In this article, as a typical use case, we investigate the impact of network structure on epidemic propagation dynamics by analyzing the massive mobile data collected from smart devices carried by the volunteers of Ebola outbreak areas. From this investigation, we obtain two observations. Based on these observations and the analytical ability of Apache Spark on streaming data and graphs, we propose a simple model to track and recognize the dynamic structure of a network. Moreover, we introduce and discuss open issues and future work for developing this proposed recognition model.