Analysis of the impact of education rate on the rumor spreading mechanism

Education remains one of the fundamental factors in people's lives. The education rate of a population reflects the degree of vulnerability of a typical individual to any kind of information. In general, one distinguishes two types of individuals in a population: educated individuals and non-educated individuals. Unlike an educated individual, a non-educated individual has a high chance to accept any untrue information (rumor). In this study, the classical SIR rumor spreading model is extended to consider the forgetting mechanism and population's education rate, to thus yield the SEIR rumor spreading model. A system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations that describes the dynamical behavior of the SEIR rumor spreading model is derived. Further, analyses of our model are carried out to determine the rumor final size and to investigate the impact of education rate on the rumor final size. Our analytical and numerical results show that the more there are educated individuals within a population, the smaller is the rumor final size. In brief, education significantly contributes to the rumor spreading cessation. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.