No Arabic abstract
Given a directed graph (representing a social network), the influence maximization problem is to find k nodes which, when influenced (or activated), would maximize the number of remaining nodes that get activated. In this paper, we consider a more general version of the problem that includes an additional set of nodes, termed as physical nodes, such that a node in the social network is covered by one or more physical nodes. A physical node exists in one of two states at any time, opened or closed, and there is a constraint on the maximum number of physical nodes that can be opened. In this setting, an inactive node in the social network becomes active if it has enough active neighbors in the social network and if it is covered by at least one of the opened physical nodes. This problem arises in disaster recovery, where a displaced social group decides to return after a disaster only after enough groups in its social network return and some infrastructure components in its neighborhood are repaired. The general problem is NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor and thus we characterize optimal and approximation algorithms for special instances of the problem.
Influence Maximization (IM) aims to maximize the number of people that become aware of a product by finding the `best set of `seed users to initiate the product advertisement. Unlike prior arts on static social networks containing fixed number of users, we undertake the first study of IM in more realistic evolving networks with temporally growing topology. The task of evolving IM ({bfseries EIM}), however, is far more challenging over static cases in the sense that seed selection should consider its impact on future users and the probabilities that users influence one another also evolve over time. We address the challenges through $mathbb{EIM}$, a newly proposed bandit-based framework that alternates between seed nodes selection and knowledge (i.e., nodes growing speed and evolving influences) learning during network evolution. Remarkably, $mathbb{EIM}$ involves three novel components to handle the uncertainties brought by evolution:
Social networks have been popular platforms for information propagation. An important use case is viral marketing: given a promotion budget, an advertiser can choose some influential users as the seed set and provide them free or discounted sample products; in this way, the advertiser hopes to increase the popularity of the product in the users friend circles by the world-of-mouth effect, and thus maximizes the number of users that information of the production can reach. There has been a body of literature studying the influence maximization problem. Nevertheless, the existing studies mostly investigate the problem on a one-off basis, assuming fixed known influence probabilities among users, or the knowledge of the exact social network topology. In practice, the social network topology and the influence probabilities are typically unknown to the advertiser, which can be varying over time, i.e., in cases of newly established, strengthened or weakened social ties. In this paper, we focus on a dynamic non-stationary social network and design a randomized algorithm, RSB, based on multi-armed bandit optimization, to maximize influence propagation over time. The algorithm produces a sequence of online decisions and calibrates its explore-exploit strategy utilizing outcomes of previous decisions. It is rigorously proven to achieve an upper-bounded regret in reward and applicable to large-scale social networks. Practical effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated using both synthetic and real-world datasets, which demonstrates that our algorithm outperforms previous stationary methods under non-stationary conditions.
Influence maximization (IM) aims at maximizing the spread of influence by offering discounts to influential users (called seeding). In many applications, due to users privacy concern, overwhelming network scale etc., it is hard to target any user in the network as one wishes. Instead, only a small subset of users is initially accessible. Such access limitation would significantly impair the influence spread, since IM often relies on seeding high degree users, which are particularly rare in such a small subset due to the power-law structure of social networks. In this paper, we attempt to solve the limited IM in real-world scenarios by the adaptive approach with seeding and diffusion uncertainty considered. Specifically, we consider fine-grained discounts and assume users accept the discount probabilistically. The diffusion process is depicted by the independent cascade model. To overcome the access limitation, we prove the set-wise friendship paradox (FP) phenomenon that neighbors have higher degree in expectation, and propose a two-stage seeding model with the FP embedded, where neighbors are seeded. On this basis, for comparison we formulate the non-adaptive case and adaptive case, both proven to be NP-hard. In the non-adaptive case, discounts are allocated to users all at once. We show the monotonicity of influence spread w.r.t. discount allocation and design a two-stage coordinate descent framework to decide the discount allocation. In the adaptive case, users are sequentially seeded based on observations of existing seeding and diffusion results. We prove the adaptive submodularity and submodularity of the influence spread function in two stages. Then, a series of adaptive greedy algorithms are proposed with constant approximation ratio.
Uncertainty about models and data is ubiquitous in the computational social sciences, and it creates a need for robust social network algorithms, which can simultaneously provide guarantees across a spectrum of models and parameter settings. We begin an investigation into this broad domain by studying robust algorithms for the Influence Maximization problem, in which the goal is to identify a set of k nodes in a social network whose joint influence on the network is maximized. We define a Robust Influence Maximization framework wherein an algorithm is presented with a set of influence functions, typically derived from different influence models or different parameter settings for the same model. The different parameter settings could be derived from observed cascades on different topics, under different conditions, or at different times. The algorithms goal is to identify a set of k nodes who are simultaneously influential for all influence functions, compared to the (function-specific) optimum solutions. We show strong approximation hardness results for this problem unless the algorithm gets to select at least a logarithmic factor more seeds than the optimum solution. However, when enough extra seeds may be selected, we show that techniques of Krause et al. can be used to approximate the optimum robust influence to within a factor of 1 - 1/e. We evaluate this bicriteria approximation algorithm against natural heuristics on several real-world data sets. Our experiments indicate that the worst-case hardness does not necessarily translate into bad performance on real-world data sets; all algorithms perform fairly well.
Influence Maximization is a NP-hard problem of selecting the optimal set of influencers in a network. Here, we propose two new approaches to influence maximization based on two very different metrics. The first metric, termed Balanced Index (BI), is fast to compute and assigns top values to two kinds of nodes: those with high resistance to adoption, and those with large out-degree. This is done by linearly combining three properties of a node: its degree, susceptibility to new opinions, and the impact its activation will have on its neighborhood. Controlling the weights between those three terms has a huge impact on performance. The second metric, termed Group Performance Index (GPI), measures performance of each node as an initiator when it is a part of randomly selected initiator set. In each such selection, the score assigned to each teammate is inversely proportional to the number of initiators causing the desired spread. These two metrics are applicable to various cascade models; here we test them on the Linear Threshold Model with fixed and known thresholds. Furthermore, we study the impact of network degree assortativity and threshold distribution on the cascade size for metrics including ours. The results demonstrate our two metrics deliver strong performance for influence maximization.