Abstract
Usually, the launch of the diffusion process is triggered by a few early adopters–i.e., seeds of diffusion. Many studies have assumed that all seeds are activated once to initiate the diffusion process in social networks and therefore are focused on finding optimal ways of choosing these nodes according to a limited budget. Despite the advances in identifying influencing spreaders, the strategy of activating all seeds at the beginning might not be sufficient in accelerating and maximising the coverage of diffusion. Also, it does not capture real scenarios in which marketing campaigns continuously monitor and support the diffusion process by seeding more nodes. More recent studies investigate the possibility of activating additional seeds as the diffusion process goes forward. In this work, we further examine this approach and search for optimal ways of distributing seeds during the diffusion process according to a pre-allocated seeding budget. Theoretically, we show that a universally best solution does not exist, and we prove that finding an optimal distribution of supporting seeds over time for a particular network is an NP-hard problem. Numerically, we evaluate several seeding strategies on different networks regarding maximising the coverage and minimising the spreading time. We find that each network topology has a best strategy given some spreading parameters. Our findings can be crucial in identifying the best strategies for budget allocation in different scenarios such as marketing or political campaigns.
Highlights
The increasing number of people who use social media has presented a new channel for marketing campaigns
Both seeds are selected based on their high degrees, which is one of the selection criteria that we consider in this study
We assume that the propagation probability PP is equal to one and that information cascades finish in four stages
Summary
The increasing number of people who use social media has presented a new channel for marketing campaigns. Strategic distribution of seeds to support diffusion in complex networks compared to the exact solution, but still has high computational requirements This is why proposed modifications of the greedy approach are focused on the reduction of the time needed to obtain the seed set [2]. Following the increasing attention directed toward continuous seeding, new questions arise about when additional seeds should be used and how many of them should be distributed over time, assuming that the campaign must finish in a given period These questions are very important for marketing campaigns since budgets are allocated in advance for seeding. We investigate how the distribution of additional seeds affects the coverage of the network We address this problem theoretically and numerically to search for optimal distributions of seeds over time in different network topologies. Our findings can help marketing campaigns better plan for the distribution of seeds over time and decide in advance how to spend their allocated budgets
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