Information Cascade

This term used to describe the spread of information through a network of people or websites and can be more formally thought of as a subgraph induced by directed edges representing the temporal flow of information.

The work in Cost Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks uses Submodularity in order to efficiently determine which set of blogs a reader should frequent in order to catch the most information cascades.

An analogy can also be made for contaminants spreading through a Water Sensor Network.