Mining Initial Nodes with BSIS Model and BS-G Algorithm on Social Networks for Influence Maximization

Influence maximization problem with applications to viral marketing has gained much attention. Underlying influence diffusion models affect influence maximizing nodes because they focus on difference aspect of influence diffusion. Nevertheless, existing diffusion models overlook two important aspects of real-world marketing - continuous trials and time restriction. This paper proposes a new realistic influence diffusion model called Continously activated and Time-restricted IC (CT-IC) model which generalizes the IC model by embedding the above two aspects. We first prove that CT-IC model satisfies two crucial properties - monotonicity and submodularity. We then provide an efficient method for calculating exact influence spread when a social network is restricted to a directed tree and a simple path. Finally, we propose a scalable algorithm for influence maximization under CT-IC model called CT-IPA. Our experiments show that CT-IC model provides seeds of higher influence spread than IC model and CT-IPA is four orders of magnitude faster than the greedy algorithm while providing similar influence spread to the greedy algorithm.

The appearance of social networks has been one of the most important events in the last decade. A social network is a network of interaction and communication whose nodes are its members and its edges are the relation between them. An outstanding concept in social networks is the concept of social influence which is of great significance. Social influence is the behavioral transformation in a person, caused by his/her relationship with other people, organizations and the network. Today, the concept of social influence is used in viral marketing. The aim of viral marketing is to find a small subset of influential users in the social networks for marketing a product. The aim of this paper is to offer an algorithm in order to choose expert and influential users in social networks. This algorithm uses leader discovery method in social networks for choosing expert and influential users. This method chooses those users as the expert and influential leaders of the social networks, who are influential among the other members and also those users that have enough specialty and knowledge about the marketing product. Consequently, the process of selecting expert and influential users for the algorithm would be quick and also the selected leaders are influential and expert enough to do marketing and advertising in the social network.

Identification of Influential Spreaders in Social Networks using Improved Hybrid Rank Method

Influence maximization is a fundamental research problem in social networks. Viral marketing, one of its applications, is to get a small number of users to adopt a product, which subsequently triggers a large cascade of further adoptions by utilizing “Word-of-Mouth” effect in social networks. Time plays an important role in the influence spread from one user to another and the time needed for a user to influence another varies. In this paper, we propose the time constrained influence maximization problem. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and prove the monotonicity and submodularity of the time constrained influence spread function. Based on this, we develop a greedy algorithm. To improve the algorithm scalability, we propose the concept of Influence Spreading Path in social networks and develop a set of new algorithms for the time constrained influence maximization problem. We further parallelize the algorithms for achieving more time savings. Additionally, we generalize the proposed algorithms for the conventional influence maximization problem without time constraints. All of the algorithms are evaluated over four public available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithms for both conventional influence maximization problem and its time constrained version.

Most of the recent online social media collects a huge volume of data not just about who is linked with whom (aka link data) but also, about who is interacting with whom (aka interaction data). The presence of both variety and volume in these datasets pose new challenges while conducting social network analysis. In particular, we present a general framework to deal with both variety and volume in the data for a key social network analysis task - Influence Maximization. The well known influence maximization problem [15] (or viral marketing through social networks) deals with selecting a few influential initial seeds to maximize the awareness of product(s) over the social network. As it is computationally hard [15], a greedy approximation algorithm is designed to address the influence maximization problem. However, the major drawback of this greedy algorithm is that it runs extremely slow even on network datasets consisting of a few thousand nodes and edges [20,6]. Several efficient heuristics have been proposed in the literature [6] to alleviate this computational difficulty; however these heuristics are designed for specific influence propagation models such as linear threshold model and independent cascade model. This motivates the strong need to design an approach that not only works with any influence propagation model, but also efficiently solves the influence maximization problem. In this paper, we precisely address this problem by proposing a new framework which fuses both link and interaction data to come up with a backbone for a given social network, which can further be used for efficient influence maximization. We then conduct thorough experimentation with several real life social network datasets such as DBLP, Epinions, Digg, and Slashdot and show that the proposed approach is efficient as well as scalable.KeywordsSocial networksinfluence maximizationviral marketingsparsification

Influence maximization is to extract a small set of nodes from a social network which influences the propagation maximally under a cascade model. In this paper, we propose a memetic algorithm for community-based influence maximization in social networks. The proposed memetic algorithm optimizes the 2-hop influence spread to find the most influential nodes. Problem-specific population initialization and similarity-based local search are designed to accelerate the convergence of the algorithm. Experiments on three realworld datasets demonstrate that our algorithm has competitive performances to the comparing algorithms in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. For example, on a real-world network of 15233 nodes and 58891 edges, the influence spread of the proposed algorithm is 12.5%, 13.2% and 173.5% higher than the three comparing algorithms Degree, PageRank and Random, respectively.

Viral marketing is widely used by businesses to achieve their marketing objectives using social media. In this work, we propose a customized crowdsourcing approach for viral marketing which aims at efficient marketing based on information propagation through a social network. We term this approach the social community-based crowdsourcing platform and integrate it with an information diffusion model to find the most efficient crowd workers. We propose an intelligent viral marketing framework (IVMF) comprising two modules to achieve this end. The first module identifies the K-most influential users in a given social network for the platform using a novel linear threshold diffusion model. The proposed model considers the different propagation behaviors of the network users in relation to different contexts. Being able to consider multiple topics in the information propagation model as opposed to only one topic makes our model more applicable to a diverse population base. Additionally, the proposed content-based improved greedy (CBIG) algorithm enhances the basic greedy algorithm by decreasing the total amount of computations required in the greedy algorithm (the total influence propagation of a unique node in any step of the greedy algorithm). The highest computational cost of the basic greedy algorithm is incurred on computing the total influence propagation of each node. The results of the experiments reveal that the number of iterations in our CBIG algorithm is much less than the basic greedy algorithm, while the precision in choosing the K influential nodes in a social network is close to the greedy algorithm. The second module of the IVMF framework, the multi-objective integer optimization model, is used to determine which social network should be targeted for viral marketing, taking into account the marketing budget. The overall IVMF framework can be used to select a social network and recruit the K-most influential crowd workers. In this paper, IVMF is exemplified in the domain of personal care industry to show its importance through a real-life case.

Influence maximization refers to selecting a small number of influential nodes in a given network to maximize the influence affected by the subset. In social network analysis and viral marketing, influence maximization is greatly significant. The greedy-based algorithm is time-consuming in estimating the expected influence diffusion of a given node set, which is unsuitable for large-scale network. The traditional heuristics often have the problem of low accuracy. In this study, in order to solve the influence maximization problem more effectively, a meta-heuristic discrete crow search algorithm (DCSA) using the intelligence of crow population is proposed. In DCSA, a new coding mechanism and discrete evolution rules are constructed. The degree-based initialization method and the random walk strategy are adopted to enhance the search ability. Moreover, according to the network topology, influential nodes Candidates are generated to avoid blindness in the process of crow search. Extensive experiments are conducted on six real-world social networks under independent cascade (IC) model, the results show that DCSA outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms and obtains comparable influence diffusion results to CELF but with lower time complexity.

Influence maximization problem focuses on finding a certain number of influential people to make their influence maximized in social networks. As positive influence has more practical significance in the viral marketing, we propose Positive Influence Maximization (PIM) problem and apply it in signed social networks. Considering the attitude of users to products, we propose a new propagation model named Linear Threshold model with Attitude (LT-A). In the model, each node has a new parameter η which denotes the attitude of node, and each edge has a new parameter ρ which denotes the relationships between nodes. We prove the PIM problem is NP-hard and the influence spread function is monotonous and submodular. Therefore, we use a greedy algorithm to obtain a solution with an approximation ratio of (1 − 1/e). Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world network datasets and experimental results show that we can achieve higher influence spread than other existing approaches by using our model.

The research of Influence maximization (IM) has always been a hot research topic in network analysis, which aims to find the most influential users in social networks to maximize the reach of influence. In recent year, many studies have focused on the problem of IM to improve efficiency by taking advantage of the small-scale community structures. However, the existing community-based methods only consider the number of nodes in a community and ignore the density of edge connections in a community. In addition, existing method can only be applied to non-overlapping community structures. In this paper, we propose community closeness-based influence maximization algorithm (CCIM) to select most influential nodes. CCIM considers the influence of point-to-point and point-to-community, reflecting the micro-level and meso-level influence. The experimental results on synthetic and three real datasets verify CCIM outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

A discrete shuffled frog-leaping algorithm to identify influential nodes for influence maximization in social networks

A new algorithm for positive influence maximization in signed networks

SummaryOnline social networks play a pivotal role in the propagation of information and influence as in the form of word‐of‐mouth spreading. The influence maximization (IM) problem is a fundamental problem to identify a small set of individuals, which have a maximal influence spread in the social network. Unfortunately, the IM problem is NP‐hard. It has been depicted that a hill‐climbing greedy approach gives a good approximation guarantee. However, it is inefficient to run on large‐scale social networks. In this paper, a global influence evaluation function is presented for the IM optimization problem. The global influence evaluation function provides a reliable expected diffusion value of influence spread under the traditional diffusion models. To optimize global influence evaluation function, an influence maximization algorithm based on social spider optimization (IM‐SSO) is presented. IM‐SSO redefines the representation and update rule of spider's vibration and performs random walk towards target vibration. The algorithm uses a jump away process to overcome the weakness of premature convergence. The experimental results on six real‐world social networks show that the proposed algorithm is more effective than the state‐of‐the‐art heuristics and more time‐efficient than CELF++, static greedy, and PSO with an approximate influence spread.

A sequential seed scheduling heuristic based on determinate and latent margin for influence maximization problem with limited budget

Influence Maximization (IM) is the problem of finding k most influential users in a social network. In this paper, a novel propagation model named Independent Cascade Model with Limited Propagation Distance (ICLPD) is established. In the ICLPD, the influence of seed nodes can only propagate limited hops and the transmission capacities of the seed nodes are different. It is proved that IM problem in the ICLPD is NP-hard and the influence spread function has submodularity. Thus a greedy algorithm can be used to get a result which guarantees a ratio of (1 − 1/e) approximation. In addition, an efficient heuristic algorithm named Local Influence Discount Heuristic (LIDH) is proposed to speed up the greedy algorithm. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show LIDH works well in the ICLPD. LIDH is several orders of magnitude faster than the greedy algorithm while its influence spread is close to that of the greedy algorithm.Keywordsinfluence maximizationpropagation modelslimited propagation distancelocal influenceheuristic algorithm