On the submodularity of influence in social networks

Abstract

We prove and extend a conjecture of Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos (KKT) on the spread of influence in social networks.A social network can be represented by a directed graph where the nodes are individuals and the edges indicate a form of social relationship. A simple way to model the diffusion of ideas, innovative behavior, or word-of-mouth effects on such a graph is to consider an increasing process of (or active) nodes: each node becomes infected once an activation function of the set of its infected neighbors crosses a certain threshold value. Such a model was introduced by KKT in [7,8] where the authors also impose several natural assumptions: the threshold values are (uniformly) random to account for our lack of knowledge of the true values; and the activation functions are monotone and submodular, i.e. have diminishing returns. The monotonicity condition indicates that a node is more likely to become active if more of its neighbors are active, while the submodularity condition, indicates that the marginal effect of each neighbor is decreasing when the set of active neighbors increases.For an initial set of active nodes s, let σ(S) denote the expected number of active nodes at termination. Here we prove a conjecture of KKT: we show that the function σ(S) is submodular under the assumptions above. We prove the same result for the expected value of any monotone, submodular function of the set of active nodes at termination.In other words, our results demonstrate that local submodularity is preserved globally under diffusion processes. This is of natural computational interest, as many optimization problems have good approximation algorithms for submodular functions. In particular, our results coupled with an argument in [7] imply that a greedy algorithm gives an (1-1/e-e)-approximation algorithm for maximizing σ(S) among all sets s of a given size. This result has important practical implications for many social network analysis problems, notably viral marketing.