For detailed explanation see here.
The datasets were published in S. Pei, L. Muchnik, J. S. Andrade, Jr., Z. Zheng, H. A. Makse, Searching for superspreaders of information in real-world social media, Sci. Rep. 4, 5547 (2014). DOI: 10.1038/srep05547. [PDF].
Visualization:
The cover of our Nature Physics 2010 paper on kcore spreaders M. Kitsak, L. K. Gallos, S. Havlin, F. Liljeros, L. Muchnik, H. Eugene Stanley, H. A. Makse, Identification of influential spreaders in complex networks, Nat. Phys. 6, 888 (2010). [PDF]
Cover:
was created by the software package of LaNet-vi, which you can download at LaNet-vi. It was developed by the group of Indiana U. There is also a webpage interface you can use there. You may want to try different parameters to adjust the figures as you wish.
Beside this figure, most of our Nature-like high-quality figures are done with MetaPost. For instance, Fig. 1 in S. Pei, et al. Sci. Rep. 4, 5547 (2014). PDF:
Unfortunately, this is not an ‘interactive’ software to generate these type of images, but it is a programmable description of the image. If you google metapost tutorial you will find a lot of pages explaining the details. In general, it is not too hard but you would need to spend some time to learn how it works.
In general, a metapost file includes commands such as: fill fullcircle scaled 8.0 shifted (253,385) withcolor (1.0,0.0,0.0); which draws a circle of radius 8.0 at coordinates 253,385, using the red color, which in rgb is (1,0,0). You need to write a program that will take as input the nodes coordinates and radii, as well as their color, and then produce a file with statements such as the above. This metapost file needs to start with beginfig(1); and end with endfig; end;
This means that a file, test.mp , may look like beginfig(1); fill fullcircle scaled 8.0 shifted (253,385) withcolor (1.0,0.0,0.0); endfig; end;
You then need to compile this file with the command mpost test.mp This will produce a file called test.1 which is a postscript file that you can rename to test.eps and is your final image.
Before preparing the mp file, you may need to use other network visualization softwares to get the coordinates of nodes, such as gephi and pajek. Then you can export the coordinates and incorporate them into the mp file. We attach two mp files as examples. You can write your own mp files based on these examples: twolayer_c1.mp , and twolayer_sample.mp .
The datafiles used in the Srep paper are:
- APS Dataset This file contains the coauthorship and citations of all scientific papers published in American Physical Society (APS) journals until 2005, including Physical Review A, B, C, D, E and Physical Review Letters.
- Facebook Dataset This dataset is available online at http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/data-wosn2009.html. It contains the friend relations of New Orleans Facebook social network as well as the wall posts records of users during a period of nearly two years. In the social network there are 63731 nodes with average degree 24.3. The total number of wall posts is 876992.
- Twitter Dataset This file contains the mention network and retweet relations extracted from the tweets sampled between January 23rd and February 8th, 2011 provided by Twitter (http://trec.nist.gov/data/tweets/). We are not allowed to distribute any private information about the twitter users, so in the dataset each user is represented by an anonymized ID. Retweet dataset in Twitter that we used in a collective influence paper can be downloaded here.