Towards large-scale social networks with online diffusion provenance detection

In this paper we study a new problem of online discovering diffusion provenances in large networks. Existing work on network diffusion provenance identification focuses on offline learning where data collected from network detectors are static and a snapshot of the network is available before learning. However, an offline learning model does not meet the need for early warning, real-time awareness, or a real-time response to malicious information spreading in networks. To this end, we propose an online regression model for real-time diffusion provenance identification. Specifically, we first use offline collected network cascades to infer the edge transmission weights, and then use an online l₁ non-convex regression model as the identification model. The proposed methods are empirically evaluated on both synthetic and real-world networks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.