CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Community structure is an important factor in the behavior of real-world networks becauseit strongly affects the stability and thus the phase transition order of the spreading dynamics.We here propose a reversible social contagion model of community networks that includesthe factor of social reinforcement. In our model an individual adopts a social contagion whenthe number of received units of information exceeds its adoption threshold. We use meanfieldapproximation to describe our proposed model, and the results agree with numericalsimulations. The numerical simulations and theoretical analyses both indicate that there is afirst-order phase transition in the spreading dynamics, and that a hysteresis loop emerges inthe system when there is a variety of initially-adopted seeds. We find an optimal communitystructure that maximizes spreading dynamics. We also find a rich phase diagram with a triplepoint that separates the no-diffusion phase from the two diffusion phases.