With the growth of online commerce, companies have created virtual communities where users can create posts and reply to posts about the company’s products. VCs can be represented as networks, with users as nodes and relationships between users as edges. Information propagates through edges. In VC studies, it is important to know how the number of topics concerning the product grows over time and what network features make a user more influential than others in the information-spreading process. The existing literature (...) has not provided a quantitative method with which to determine key points during the topic emergence process. Also, few researchers have considered the link between multilayer physical features and the nodes’ spreading influence. In this paper, we present two new ideas to enrich network theory as applied to VCs: a novel application of an adjusted coefficient of determination to topic growth and an adjustment to the Jaccard coefficient to measure the connection between two users. A two-layer network model was first used to study the spread of topics through a VC. A random forest method was then applied to rank various factors that might determine an individual user’s importance in topic spreading through a VC. Our research provides insightful ways for enterprises to mine information from VCs. (shrink)

Under “the Belt and Road” initiative, China promoted cooperation between domestic enterprises and international ports vigorously, which brought back fruitful results, while the rational selection of strategic pivots ports and the optimization of the layout of the port network are important guarantees to a further promotion to the economic development of “the Belt and Road” ports and give full play to the driving and radiation role of strategic pivots ports. On the basis of constructing a network of 155 ports in (...) the world, according to the number of ports crossed by the shortest path and betweenness centrality in the network, this paper uses K-Medoids clustering algorithm to train the strategic importance of ports and verifies the reliability of the analysis results. On this basis, the joint coverage analysis of strategically important ports is carried out, 17 ports are identified as strategic pivots ports of the global port network, and, finally, based on the two attributes of “the Belt and Road” and “Chinese enterprise participation” of strategic pivots ports, the leading role of strategic pivots ports in geographical location, path coverage, development potential, cooperation stability, and control is analyzed, and instructive suggestions are put forward. (shrink)