Information diffusion on a temporal network can be modeled by viral spreading processes such as the Susceptible-Infected (SI) spreading process. An infected node meaning that the node possesses the information could spread the information to a Susceptible node with a given spreading probability β whenever a contact happens between the two nodes. Progress has been made in the understanding of how temporal network features and the choice of the source node affect the prevalence, i.e. the percentage of nodes reached by the information. In this work, we explore further: which node pairs are likely to contribute to the actual diffusion of information, i.e. appear in a diffusion trajectory? How is this related to the local temporal connection features of the node pair? Such deep understanding of the role of node pairs is crucial to explain and control the prevalence of information spread. First, we propose the construction of an information diffusion backbone G_B (β) for a SI spreading process with an infection probability β on a temporal network. The backbone is a weighted network where the weight of each node pair indicates how likely the node pair contributes to a diffusion process starting from an arbitrary node. Second, we investigate the relation between the backbones with different infection probabilities on a temporal network. We find that the backbone topologies obtained for low and high infection probabilities approach the backbone G_B (β→0) and G_B (β=1), respectively. The backbone G_B (β→0) equals the integrated weighted network, where the weight of a node pair counts the total number of contacts in between, a local temporal connection feature. Finally, we discover a local connection feature among many other features that could well predict which node pairs are likely to appear in G_B (β=1), whose computation complexity is high. This local feature encodes the time that each contact occurs, pointing out the importance of temporal features in determining the role of node pairs in a dynamic process beyond the features of the integrated network.
