Influence Maximization on Social Networks: A Study

Author(s):  
Shashank Sheshar Singh ◽  
Kuldeep Singh ◽  
Ajay Kumar ◽  
Bhaskar Biswas

Background: Influence Maximization, which selects a set of k users (called seed set) from a social network to maximize the expected number of influenced users (called influence spread), is a key algorithmic problem in social influence analysis. Objective: In this paper, we give recent studies on influence maximization algorithms. The main goal of this survey is to provide recent studies and future research opportunities. We give taxonomy of influence maximization algorithms with the comparative theoretical analysis. Conclusion: This paper provides a theoretical analysis of influence maximization problem based on algorithm design perspective and also provides the performance analysis of existing algorithms.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sun Chengai ◽  
Duan Xiuliang ◽  
Qiu Liqing ◽  
Shi Qiang ◽  
Li Tengteng

Abstract A core issue in influence propagation is influence maximization, which aims to find a group of nodes under a specific information diffusion model and maximize the final influence of this group of nodes. The limitation of the existing researches is that they excessively depend on the information diffusion model and randomly set the propagation ability (probability). Therefore, most of the algorithms for solving the influence maximization problem are basically difficult to expand in large social networks. Another challenge is that fewer researchers have paid attention to the problem of the large difference between the estimated influence spread and the actual influence spread. A measure to solve the influence maximization problem is applying advanced neural network architecture also represents learning method. Based on this idea, the paper proposes Representation Learning for Influence Maximization (RLIM) algorithm. The premise of this algorithm is to construct the influence cascade of each source node. The key is to adopt neural network architecture to realize the prediction of propagation ability. The purpose is to apply the propagation ability to the influence maximization problem by representation learning. Furthermore, the results of the experiments show that RLIM algorithm has greater diffusion ability than the state-of-the-art algorithms on different online social network data sets, and the diffusion of information is more accurate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Jianxiong Guo ◽  
Weili Wu

Influence maximization problem attempts to find a small subset of nodes that makes the expected influence spread maximized, which has been researched intensively before. They all assumed that each user in the seed set we select is activated successfully and then spread the influence. However, in the real scenario, not all users in the seed set are willing to be an influencer. Based on that, we consider each user associated with a probability with which we can activate her as a seed, and we can attempt to activate her many times. In this article, we study the adaptive influence maximization with multiple activations (Adaptive-IMMA) problem, where we select a node in each iteration, observe whether she accepts to be a seed, if yes, wait to observe the influence diffusion process; if no, we can attempt to activate her again with a higher cost or select another node as a seed. We model the multiple activations mathematically and define it on the domain of integer lattice. We propose a new concept, adaptive dr-submodularity, and show our Adaptive-IMMA is the problem that maximizing an adaptive monotone and dr-submodular function under the expected knapsack constraint. Adaptive dr-submodular maximization problem is never covered by any existing studies. Thus, we summarize its properties and study its approximability comprehensively, which is a non-trivial generalization of existing analysis about adaptive submodularity. Besides, to overcome the difficulty to estimate the expected influence spread, we combine our adaptive greedy policy with sampling techniques without losing the approximation ratio but reducing the time complexity. Finally, we conduct experiments on several real datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed policies.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Scarabaggio ◽  
Raffaele Carli ◽  
Mariagrazia Dotoli

The main characteristic of social networks is their ability to quickly spread information between a large group of people. This phenomenon is generated by the social influence that individuals induce on each other.<br>The widespread use of online social networks (e.g., Facebook) increases researchers' interest in how influence propagates through these networks. One of the most important research issues in this field is the so-called influence maximization problem, which essentially consists in selecting the most influential users (i.e., those who are able to maximize the spread of influence through the social network).<br>Due to its practical importance in various applications (e.g., viral marketing, target advertisement, personalized recommendation), such a problem has been studied in several variants. Different solution methodologies have been proposed. Nevertheless, the current open challenge in the resolution of the influence maximization problem still concerns achieving a good trade-off between accuracy and computational time. <br>In this context, based on the well-known independent cascade and the linear threshold models of social networks, we propose a novel low-complexity and highly accurate algorithm for selecting an initial group of nodes to maximize the spread of influence in large-scale networks. In particular, the key idea consists in iteratively removing the overlap of influence spread induced by different seed nodes. Application to several numerical experiments based on real datasets proves that the proposed algorithm effectively finds practical near-optimal solutions of the addressed influence maximization problem in a computationally efficient fashion. Finally, comparison with the best performing state of the art algorithms demonstrates that in large scale scenarios, the proposed approach shows higher performance in terms of influence spread and running time.


Author(s):  
Esmaeil Bagheri ◽  
Gholamhossein Dastghaibyfard ◽  
Ali Hamzeh

Influence maximization algorithms try to select a set of individuals in social networks that are more influential. The Influence maximization problem is important in marketing and many researchers has researched on it and proposed new algorithms. All proposed algorithms are not scalable and are very time consuming for very large social networks generally. In this paper, a fast and scalable influence maximization algorithm called FSIM is proposed based on community detection. FSIM algorithm decreases number of nodes that must be examined without loss of the operations quality therefore it can find seeds quickly. FSIM can maximize influence in large social networks. Experimental results show FSIM is faster and more scalable than existing algorithms.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Scarabaggio ◽  
Raffaele Carli ◽  
Mariagrazia Dotoli

The main characteristic of social networks is their ability to quickly spread information between a large group of people. This phenomenon is generated by the social influence that individuals induce on each other.<br>The widespread use of online social networks (e.g., Facebook) increases researchers' interest in how influence propagates through these networks. One of the most important research issues in this field is the so-called influence maximization problem, which essentially consists in selecting the most influential users (i.e., those who are able to maximize the spread of influence through the social network).<br>Due to its practical importance in various applications (e.g., viral marketing, target advertisement, personalized recommendation), such a problem has been studied in several variants. Different solution methodologies have been proposed. Nevertheless, the current open challenge in the resolution of the influence maximization problem still concerns achieving a good trade-off between accuracy and computational time. <br>In this context, based on the well-known independent cascade and the linear threshold models of social networks, we propose a novel low-complexity and highly accurate algorithm for selecting an initial group of nodes to maximize the spread of influence in large-scale networks. In particular, the key idea consists in iteratively removing the overlap of influence spread induced by different seed nodes. Application to several numerical experiments based on real datasets proves that the proposed algorithm effectively finds practical near-optimal solutions of the addressed influence maximization problem in a computationally efficient fashion. Finally, comparison with the best performing state of the art algorithms demonstrates that in large scale scenarios, the proposed approach shows higher performance in terms of influence spread and running time.


Author(s):  
Liman Du ◽  
Wenguo Yang ◽  
Suixiang Gao

The number of social individuals who interact with their friends through social networks is increasing, leading to an undeniable fact that word-of-mouth marketing has become one of the useful ways to promote sale of products. The Constrained Profit Maximization in Attribute network (CPMA) problem, as an extension of the classical influence maximization problem, is the main focus of this paper. We propose the profit maximization in attribute network problem under a cardinality constraint which is closer to the actual situation. The profit spread metric of CPMA calculates the total benefit and cost generated by all the active nodes. Different from the classical Influence Maximization problem, the influence strength should be recalculated according to the emotional tendency and classification label of nodes in attribute networks. The profit spread metric is no longer monotone and submodular in general. Given that the profit spread metric can be expressed as the difference between two submodular functions and admits a DS decomposition, a three-phase algorithm named as Marginal increment and Community-based Prune and Search(MCPS) Algorithm frame is proposed which is based on Louvain algorithm and logistic function. Due to the method of marginal increment, MPCS algorithm can compute profit spread more directly and accurately. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MCPS algorithm.


Computing ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahra Aghaee ◽  
Mohammad Mahdi Ghasemi ◽  
Hamid Ahmadi Beni ◽  
Asgarali Bouyer ◽  
Afsaneh Fatemi

In a social network the individuals connected to one another become influenced by one another, while some are more influential than others and able to direct groups of individuals towards a move, an idea and an entity. These individuals are named influential users. Attempt is made by the social network researchers to identify such individuals because by changing their behaviors and ideologies due to communications and the high influence on one another would change many others' behaviors and ideologies in a given community. In information diffusion models, at all stages, individuals are influenced by their neighboring people. These influences and impressions thereof are constructive in an information diffusion process. In the Influence Maximization problem, the goal is to finding a subset of individuals in a social network such that by activating them, the spread of influence is maximized. In this work a new algorithm is presented to identify most influential users under the linear threshold diffusion model. It uses explicit multimodal evolutionary algorithms. Four different datasets are used to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the precision of our method in average is improved 4.8% compare to best known previous works.


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