Why Do Cascade Sizes Follow a Power-Law?

Abstract

We introduce random directed acyclic graph and use it to model the information diffusion network. Subsequently, we analyze the cascade generation model (CGM) introduced by Leskovec et al. [19]. Until now only empirical studies of this model were done. In this paper, we present the first theoretical proof that the sizes of cascades generated by the CGM follow the power-law distribution, which is consistent with multiple empirical analysis of the large social networks. We compared the assumptions of our model with the Twitter social network and tested the goodness of approximation.