Data Integration Landscapes: The Case for Non-optimal Solutions in Network Diffusion Models.

The successful application of computational models presupposes access to accurate, relevant, and representative datasets. The growth of public data, and the increasing practice of data sharing and reuse, emphasises the importance of data provenance and increases the need for modellers to understand how data processing decisions might impact model output. One key step in the data processing pipeline is that of data integration and entity resolution, where entities are matched across disparate datasets. In this paper, we present a new formulation of data integration in complex networks that incorporates integration uncertainty. We define an approach for understanding how different data integration setups can impact the results of network diffusion models under this uncertainty, allowing one to systematically characterise potential model outputs in order to create an output distribution that provides a more comprehensive picture.