SMG: Fast scalable greedy algorithm for influence maximization in social networks

Abstract

Influence maximization is the problem of finding k most influential nodes in a social network. Many works have been done in two different categories, greedy approaches and heuristic approaches. The greedy approaches have better influence spread, but lower scalability on large networks. The heuristic approaches are scalable and fast but not for all type of networks. Improving the scalability of greedy approach is still an open and hot issue. In this work we present a fast greedy algorithm called State Machine Greedy that improves the existing algorithms by reducing calculations in two parts: (1) counting the traversing nodes in estimate propagation procedure, (2) Monte-Carlo graph construction in simulation of diffusion. The results show that our method makes a huge improvement in the speed over the existing greedy approaches.