Privacy Reserved Influence Maximization in GPS-Enabled Cyber-Physical and Online Social Networks

Abstract

Influence maximization is one of the most fundamental problems in social network analysis due to its significant impact on viral marketing and targeted advertisements. Considerable amount of works has extensively studied to analyze the influence in social networks, but most of the existing works unfortunately neglected the fact that the location information in the cyber-physical world could also play an important role in the influence prorogation. Furthermore, even though a few works consider a little location information to enhance the influence maximization, they do not discuss any privacy issue of the model and expose user's location information directly to the public. This paper considers the problem of influence maximization in both GPS-enabled cyber-physical and online social networks with privacy reservation. We propose one novel model merging both GPS data of cyber-physical network and relationship data of online social network together in a unified framework, then we provide an efficient algorithm to solve the influence maximization problem in the framework. Besides the influence maximization problem, our framework could also support other applications involving both cyber-physical and online social networks. Further more, to protect the sensitive location and link information, we also provide corresponding techniques to protect the privacy during the whole influence maximization process. Empirical studies of real life datasets demonstrate the power of engaging location information to influence maximization, and suggest that our resolution outperforming most existing alternative algorithms with the protection of location privacy.