A Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Cascades on Networks

How does information flow in online social networks? How does the structure and size of the information cascade evolve in time? How can people efficiently mine the information contained in cascade dynamics? The authors approach these questions empirically and present an efficient and scalable mathematical framework for quantitative analysis of cascades on networks. They define a cascade generating function that captures the details of the microscopic dynamics of the cascades. The authors show that this function can also be used to compute the macroscopic properties of cascades, such as their size, spread, diameter, number of paths, and average path length.