Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Social Amplifier—Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies

2013; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 152; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10955-013-0759-z

1572-9613

Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli, Yuval Elovici, Alfred M. Bruckstein⋆, Alex Pentland, David Lazer,

Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis

This paper develops a methodology to aggregate signals in a network regarding some hidden state of the world. We argue that focusing on edges around hubs will under certain circumstances amplify the faint signals disseminating in a network, allowing for more efficient detection of that hidden state. We apply this method to detecting emergencies in mobile phone data, demonstrating that under a broad range of cases and a constraint in how many edges can be observed at a time, focusing on the egocentric networks around key hubs will be more effective than sampling random edges. We support this conclusion analytically, through simulations, and with analysis of a dataset containing the call log data from a major mobile carrier in a European nation.