Taxonomy of Influence Maximization Techniques in Unknown Social Networks

Author(s):  
B. Bazeer Ahamed ◽  
Sudhakaran Periakaruppan

Influence maximization in online social networks (OSNs) is the problem of discovering few nodes or users in the social network termed as ‘seed nodes', which can help the spread of influence in the network. With the tremendous growth in social networking, the influence exerted by users of a social network on other online users has caught the attention of researchers to develop effective influence maximization algorithms to be applied in the field of business strategies. The main application of influence maximization is promoting the product to a set of users. However, a real challenge in influence maximization algorithms to deal with enormous amount of users or nodes obtainable in any OSN is posed. The authors focused on graph mining of OSNs for generating ‘seed sets' using standard influence maximization techniques. Many standard influence maximization models are used for calculation of spread of influence; a novel influence maximization technique, namely the DegGreedy technique, has been illustrated along with experimental results to make a comparative analysis of the existing techniques.

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Andriotis ◽  
Zacharias Tzermias ◽  
Anthi Mparmpaki ◽  
Sotiris Ioannidis ◽  
George Oikonomou

While technology matures and becomes more productive, mobile devices can be affordable and, consequently, fully integrated in people's lives. After their unexpected bloom and acceptance, Online Social Networks are now sources of valuable information. The authors therefore use them for tasks varying from direct marketing to forensic analysis. The authors have already seen Social Network Forensics techniques focused on particular networks implementing methods that collect data from user accounts. During the forensic analysis it is common to aggregate information from different sources but, usually, this procedure causes correlation problems. Here, the authors present their method to correlate data gathered from various social networks in combination with smartphones creating a new form of social map of the user under investigation. In addition, the authors introduce a multi level graph that utilises the correlated information from the smartphone and the social networks and demonstrates in three dimensions the relevance of each contact with the suspect.


Author(s):  
Jaymeen R. Shah ◽  
Hsun-Ming Lee

During the next decade, enrollment growth in Information Systems (IS) related majors is unlikely to meet the predicted demand for qualified IS graduates. Gender imbalance in the IS related program makes the situation worse as enrollment and retention of women in the IS major has been proportionately low compared to male. In recent years, majority of high school and college students have integrated social networking sites in their daily life and habitually use these sites. Providing female students access to role models via an online social network may enhance their motivation to continue as an IS major and pursue a career in IS field. For this study, the authors follow the action research process – exploration of information systems development. In particular, a Facebook application was developed to build the social network connecting role models and students. Using the application, a basic framework is tested based on the gender of participants. The results suggest that it is necessary to have adequate number of role models accessible to students as female role-models tend to select fewer students to develop relationships with a preference for female students. Female students likely prefer composite role models from a variety of sources. This pilot study yields valuable lessons to provide informal learning fostered by role modeling via online social networks. The Facebook application may be further expanded to enhance female students' interests in IS related careers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 95
Author(s):  
Wang ◽  
Zhu ◽  
Liu ◽  
Wang

Social networks have attracted a lot of attention as novel information or advertisement diffusion media for viral marketing. Influence maximization describes the problem of finding a small subset of seed nodes in a social network that could maximize the spread of influence. A lot of algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. Recently, in order to achieve more realistic viral marketing scenarios, some constrained versions of influence maximization, which consider time constraints, budget constraints and so on, have been proposed. However, none of them considers the memory effect and the social reinforcement effect, which are ubiquitous properties of social networks. In this paper, we define a new constrained version of the influence maximization problem that captures the social reinforcement and memory effects. We first propose a novel propagation model to capture the dynamics of the memory and social reinforcement effects. Then, we modify two baseline algorithms and design a new algorithm to solve the problem under the model. Experiments show that our algorithm achieves the best performance with relatively low time complexity. We also demonstrate that the new version captures some important properties of viral marketing in social networks, such as such as social reinforcements, and could explain some phenomena that cannot be explained by existing influence maximization problem definitions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 459-477
Author(s):  
Sarah Whitcomb Laiola

This article addresses issues of user precarity and vulnerability in online social networks. As social media criticism by Jose van Dijck, Felix Stalder, and Geert Lovink describes, the social web is a predatory system that exploits users’ desires for connection. Although accurate, this critical description casts the social web as a zone where users are always already disempowered, so fails to imagine possibilities for users beyond this paradigm. This article examines Natalie Bookchin’s composite video series, Testament, as it mobilizes an alt-(ernative) social network of vernacular video on YouTube. In the first place, the alt-social network works as an iteration of “tactical media” to critically reimagine empowered user-to-user interactions on the social web. In the second place, it obfuscates YouTube’s data-mining functionality, so allows users to socialize online in a way that evades their direct translation into data and the exploitation of their social labor.


Author(s):  
Jingwen Zhang ◽  
Damon Centola

While social comparison research has focused on the processes and consequences of how the comparer gleans information from the comparison other (individual or group), recent research on social networks demonstrates how information and influence are distributed across persons in a network. This chapter reviews social influence processes in social networks. The authors first review recent research on social comparison and its negative consequences in online social networks. Then the authors delve into discussing the social network causes of biased social perceptions online and how this can be remedied by building more accurate perceptions through constructed online networks. Lastly, the authors discuss findings from recent experimental studies that illustrate how constructed online networks can harness social comparison to induce significant changes in health behavior.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amardeep Singh ◽  
Divya Bansal ◽  
Sanjeev Sofat

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. provide data of its users to the demanding organizations to better comprehend the quality of their potential clients. Publishing confidential data of social network users in its raw form raises several privacy and security concerns. Recently, some anonymization techniques have been developed to address these issues. In this paper, a technique to prevent identity disclosure through structure attacks has been proposed which not only prevents identity disclosure but also preserves utility of data published by online social networks. Algorithms have been developed by using noise nodes/edges with the consideration of introducing minimum change in the original graphical structure of social networks. The authors' work is unique in the sense that previous works are based on edge editing only but their proposed work protects against structure attacks using mutual nodes in the social network and the effectiveness of the proposed technique has been proved using APL (Average Path Length) and information loss as parameters.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Guanhao Wu ◽  
Xiaofeng Gao ◽  
Ge Yan ◽  
Guihai Chen

Influence Maximization (IM) problem is to select influential users to maximize the influence spread, which plays an important role in many real-world applications such as product recommendation, epidemic control, and network monitoring. Nowadays multiple kinds of information can propagate in online social networks simultaneously, but current literature seldom discuss about this phenomenon. Accordingly, in this article, we propose Multiple Influence Maximization (MIM) problem where multiple information can propagate in a single network with different propagation probabilities. The goal of MIM problems is to maximize the overall accumulative influence spreads of different information with the limit of seed budget . To solve MIM problems, we first propose a greedy framework to solve MIM problems which maintains an -approximate ratio. We further propose parallel algorithms based on semaphores, an inter-thread communication mechanism, which significantly improves our algorithms efficiency. Then we conduct experiments for our framework using complex social network datasets with 12k, 154k, 317k, and 1.1m nodes, and the experimental results show that our greedy framework outperforms other heuristic algorithms greatly for large influence spread and parallelization of algorithms reduces running time observably with acceptable memory overhead.


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):  
Y. Helan Mettilda ◽  
R. Anbuselvi

Psychological theories propose that emotion represents the status of mind and natural responses of one’s cognitive system. Emotions are a difficult state of feeling that results in physical and psychological changes that power our actions. In this paper, we study an interesting problem of emotion infection in social networks.  In this paper, we study a different interesting problem of emotion influence in social networks. In particular, by employing an image social network as the basis of our study, we try to unveil how users’ emotional statuses influence each other and how users’ positions in the social network affect their influential strength on emotion in different papers.  We also find out several interesting phenomena. For example, the possibility that a user feels happy is about linear to the number of friends who are also happy; but taking a nearer look, the pleasure chance is super linear to the number of happy friends who act as opinion leaders in the network and sub linear in the number of happy friends who span structural holes. This offers a new chance to understand the basic mechanism of emotional contagion in online social networks.


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