Social Network Analysis in Public Group Emergency Management and Control

Abstract

Public group emergency is a kind of group behavior with respect to a suddenly occurred and urgent event, which always would cause grave social harmfulness, endangering social stability and developing. One of the key problems for investigators to manage and control the developing of a public group emergency is to understand the importance of social influence in the social network, where social interactions help spreading information or rumors from one person to another. Social influence occurs when others affect one’s knowledge, attitudes, emotions, opinions, or behaviors. The key influential participants in the social network of public group emergency play a very important role in information transmission. In this paper, we first present statistical measurements related to social influence, and then we present an entropy-based reachable approach of discovering key influential participants. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively and simply discover the most influential participants in the public group emergency social network.