The Impact of Initial Seeds in Connecting Two Separated Networks on Resulting Social Capital

Aggregating different networks is an important fact in socio-economical collaboration between different separated organizations. The first challenge is the quality of connecting nodes between two networks that some results have been reported in the recent years. The second obstacle is selecting the initial group of nodes for connecting to the other network in quantitative context. The latter, implies to the optimization the method so that a minimum effective group may yield higher outputs that a big randomly selected groups. Here, we do not intend to discuss about selecting method of nodes, oppositely the number of nodes (seed) will be addressed. The existence of sorted high priority nodes is the premises of this study and we aim to find the best number ( minimum number of nodes) that reduces the costs (connections) of aggregating procedure. Here, we study the diffusion of the information in the final network as one of the important parameters in the social capital of networks. The number of initially informed nodes for spreading the information in a given network is called seed and studies such as [5] address either the algorithms for selecting nodes or the percentage of nodes compared to all nodes of network in the first stage of information diffusion. This approach aims to use the previous studies to find initial seed number, not for spreading the information, but for selecting the number of initial group of nodes in both given networks for maximizing the flow of the information in the aggregated network. The main assumption is that the list of high priority nodes for connection is available. The mentioned list may be indicated with different algorithms like centrality in the network. Answering the following question is the main question of this study: What percentage of initial high priority nodes in initial networks must be selected to making bridges between them? Two different networks about co-presence and mobile phone connection of students are considered. All nodes are ranked in their network according to their priorities for connecting two networks. Different groups of nodes beginning from the node with highest priority are used for bridging two networks. In any arrangement, the performance of resulting network in flow of information is measured. For evaluating the performance of any topology, a group of usual parameters and also some new metric that have been recently introduced are used. A software module is used for calculating the parameters for examining the Cascade model of the information diffusion in final networks. Finally, the effect of resulting seeds on the performance of any network are studied.