Knowledge diffusion in the collaboration hypernetwork

•A knowledge diffusion model based on the local-world hypernetwork is proposed.•The preferential diffusion mechanism and the absorptive capability are introduced.•The hypernetwork is more suitable for investigating the knowledge diffusion.

As knowledge constitutes a primary productive force, it is important to understand the performance of knowledge diffusion. In this paper, we present a knowledge diffusion model based on the local-world non-uniform hypernetwork, which introduces the preferential diffusion mechanism and the knowledge absorptive capability αjαj, where αjαj is correlated with the hyperdegree dH(j)dH(j) of node jj. At each time step, we randomly select a node ii as the sender; a receiver node is selected from the set of nodes that the sender ii has published with previously, with probability proportional to the number of papers they have published together. Applying the average knowledge stock V¯(t), the variance σ2(t)σ2(t) and the variance coefficient c(t)c(t) of knowledge stock to measure the growth and diffusion of knowledge and the adequacy of knowledge diffusion, we have made 3 groups of comparative experiments to investigate how different network structures, hypernetwork sizes and knowledge evolution mechanisms affect the knowledge diffusion, respectively. As the diffusion mechanisms based on the hypernetwork combine with the hyperdegree of node, the hypernetwork is more suitable for investigating the performance of knowledge diffusion. Therefore, the proposed model could be helpful for deeply understanding the process of the knowledge diffusion in the collaboration hypernetwork.