A cost optimized reverse influence maximization in social networks

Abstract

In recent years, Influence Maximization (IM) has gained great research interest in the field of social network research. The IM is a viral marketing based approach to find the influential users on the social networks. It determines a small seed set that can activate a maximum number of nodes in the network under some diffusion models such as Linear Threshold model or Independent Cascade model. However, previous works have not focused on the opportunity cost defined by the minimum number of nodes that must be motivated in order to activate the initial seed nodes. In this work, we have introduced a Reverse Influence Maximization (RIM) problem to estimate the opportunity cost. The RIM, working in opposite manner to IM, calculates the opportunity cost for viral marketing in the social networks. We have proposed the Extended Randomized Linear Threshold RIM (ERLT-RIM) model to solve the RIM problem. The ERLT-RIM is a Linear Threshold (LT)-based model which is an extension to the existing RLT-RIM model. We also have evaluated the performance of the algorithm using three real-world datasets. The result shows that the proposed model determines the optimal opportunity cost with time efficiency as compared to existing models.