Influence Maximization Algorithm Research Articles

Influence maximization algorithm based on reducing search space in the social networks

The influence maximization problem in social networks is an optimization problem in viral marketing. This problem is concerned with identifying a certain number of people with the most influence in the social network level. Considering the NP-hard of this problem, finding an optimal solution with acceptable accuracy and the low running time is of the high importance. To this purpose, GIN (Group of Influential Nodes) algorithm is presented in this article which creates different groups of graph nodes with more connections than other groups. Then, it selects specific nodes from each group to reduce the search space to find the most influential nodes. Following the greedy method, it selects the seed nodes with the highest expected diffusion value. Experimental results show that the GIN algorithm has provided high influence spread along with low running time in comparison algorithms on all seven real-world datasets.

Behavioral Information Diffusion for Opinion Maximization in Online Social Networks

Online social networks provide a platform to diffuse information and influence people's opinion. Conventional models for information diffusion do not take into account the specifics of each users’ personality, behavior, and their opinion. This work adopts the “Big Five” model from the social sciences to ascribe each user node with a personality. We propose a behavioral independent cascade (BIC) model that considers the personalities and opinions of user nodes when computing propagation probabilities for diffusion. We use this model to study the opinion maximization (OM) problem and prove it is NP-hard under our BIC model. Under the BIC model, we show that the objective function of the proposed OM problem is not submodular. We then propose an algorithm to solve the OM problem in linear-time based on a state-of-the-art influence maximization (IM) algorithm. We run extensive simulations under four cases where initial opinion is distributed in polarized/non-polarized and community/non-community cases. We find that when communities are polarized, activating a large number of nodes is ineffective towards maximizing opinion. Further, we find that our proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art IM algorithms in terms of maximizing opinion in uniform opinion distribution—despite activating fewer nodes to be spreaders.

Influence maximization diffusion models based on engagement and activeness on instagram

An influencer is an impactful content creator on social media. The emergence of influencers led to increased influencer marketing. The task of picking the right influencers is widely studied through influence maximization (IM). Existing IM studies have matured in terms of theoretical performance, but not very realistic in real-world. First, existing IM diffusion models didn't consider the engagement level and activeness of the users. Secondly, there were no studies that compare activated users against actual influenced users on Instagram. To address both problems, three new realistic diffusion models are proposed, based on the Independent Cascade and Linear Threshold models, namely IC-u, LT-u and UAD models. This study was implemented using Instagram data. Meanwhile, UAD model uses two thresholds, namely user's awareness, and user's tendency. These models incorporate user's activeness and engagement factors that represent the susceptibility to influence and the degree of influence, respectively. The proposed models were proven to be up to 2.72x more realistic and produced more engaging and more active users. The seeds set (influencers) identified by the IM algorithms under the proposed models are expected to have more impact on an actual brand marketing campaign if compared to existing models.

Research on a Novel Influence Maximization Algorithm Based on Community Structure

With the research of influence maximization algorithm, many researchers have found that the existing algorithm has the problem of overlapping influence of seed nodes. In order to solve the problem of overlapping influence of seed nodes, this paper proposes an IMCS algorithm based on community structure. Firstly, we divide the community through the central node, and the quality of community division is ensured by defining community fitness and node contribution. Then through the analysis of the community division results, the seed node selects the one with the largest degree. Since most of the nodes activated by seed nodes of different communities also belong to different communities, this method solves the problem of overlapping influence to a certain extent. The experimental results show that the effectiveness of the IMCS algorithm is verified under the real network, cooperative network and artificial network, and the IMCS algorithm has a better effect than IEIR and Degree algorithms in most networks under the IC model.

An adaptive heuristic clustering algorithm for influence maximization in complex networks

Influence maximization research in the real world allows us to better understand, accelerate spreading processes for innovations and products, and effectively analyze, predict, and control the spread of diseases, rumors, and computer viruses. In this paper, we first put forward a new path-based node similarity measure, named the dynamic local similarity index, which can be dynamically adjusted to the optimal mode according to network topology characteristics. Compared to the Katz index with high complexity and an LP index with a limited application range, the proposed index achieves an excellent balance between complexity and precision. Second, combining the extended neighborhood coreness with the minimum distance, a novel strategy is presented for selecting initial centers of clusters, which is helpful for speeding up clustering convergence and avoiding local optimum, especially in non-connected networks. Subsequently, we present an adaptive heuristic clustering algorithm, which can find the seed set with maximum collective influence through clustering. The empirical results on four real datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, which compares favorably to several state-of-the-art algorithms.

A numerical evaluation of the accuracy of influence maximization algorithms

We develop an algorithm to compute exact solutions to the influence maximization problem using concepts from reverse influence sampling (RIS). We implement the algorithm using GPU resources to evaluate the empirical accuracy of theoretically guaranteed greedy and RIS approximate solutions. We find that the approximations yield solutions that are remarkably close to optimal—usually achieving greater than 99% of the optimal influence spread. This accuracy is consistent across a wide range of network structures.

RNA: A Reject Neighbors Algorithm for Influence Maximization in Complex Networks

The influence maximization problem (IMP) in complex networks is to address finding a set of key nodes that play vital roles in the information diffusion process, and when these nodes are employed as ”seed nodes”, the diffusion effect is maximized. First, this paper presents a refined network centrality measure, a refined shell (RS) index for node ranking, and then proposes an algorithm for identifying key node sets, namely the reject neighbors algorithm (RNA), which consists of two main sequential parts, i.e., node ranking and node selection. The RNA refuses to select multiple-order neighbors of the seed nodes, scatters the selected nodes from each other, and results in the maximum influence of the identified node set on the whole network. Experimental results on real-world network datasets show that the key node set identified by the RNA exhibits significant propagation capability.

Scalable Influence Maximization Meets Efficiency and Effectiveness in Large-Scale Social Networks

Influence maximization is a problem that aims to select top [Formula: see text] influential nodes to maximize the spread of influence in social networks. The classical greedy-based algorithms and their improvements are relatively slow or not scalable. The efficiency of heuristic algorithms is fast but their accuracy is unacceptable. Some algorithms improve the accuracy and efficiency by consuming a large amount of memory usage. To overcome the above shortcoming, this paper proposes a fast and scalable algorithm for influence maximization, called K-paths, which utilizes the influence tree to estimate the influence spread. Additionally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the K-paths algorithm outperforms the comparison algorithms in terms of efficiency while keeping competitive accuracy.

Dynamic top-k influence maximization in social networks

The problem of top-k influence maximization is to find the set of k users in a social network that can maximize the spread of influence under certain influence propagation model. This paper studies the influence maximization problem together with network dynamics. For example, given a real-life social network that evolves over time, we want to find k most influential users on everyday basis. This dynamic influence maximization problem has wide applications in practice. However, to our best knowledge, there is little prior work that studies this problem. Applying existing influence maximization algorithms at every time step provides a straightforward solution to the dynamic top-k influence maximization problem. Such a solution is, however, inefficient as it completely ignores the smoothness of network change. By analyzing two real social networks, Brightkite and Gowalla, we observe that the top-k influential set, as well as its influence value, does not change dramatically over time. Hence, it is possible to find the new top-k influential set by updating the previous one. We propose an efficient incremental update framework that takes advantage of such smoothness of network change. The proposed method achieves the same approximation ratio of 1 − e− 1 as its state-of-the-art static counterparts. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the straightforward solution by a wide margin.

A community-based algorithm for influence maximization on dynamic social networks

The purpose of the influence maximization is to find the top k influential seeds which can maximize the influence spread. Recently, some researchers address this problem through community structure. However, most of these community-based studies only consider the static social network, which ignore s that social networks change frequently. In order to deal with the above problem, we present a community-based algorithm on the dynamic social network, which is divided into three phases: (i) community detection, (ii) candidate seed set on the dynamic network, and (iii) final seed set. In the first phase, we use the Louvain algorithm to obtain the community structure. In each community, we analyze the node location to judge the importance of the node. In the second phase, considering the dynamic social network, when a node is added to the network or removed from the network, we update the structure of the social network. Then, the candidate nodes are those nodes with a large influence in each community. And in the third phase, we select k influential seeds from the candidate seeds by CELF algorithm. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm obtains a better influence spread than many baseline algorithms as well as an acceptable running time while considering the dynamic social networks.

CutTheTail: An Accurate and Space-Efficient Heuristic Algorithm for Influence Maximization

Abstract Algorithmic problem of computing the most influential nodes in an arbitrary graph (influence maximization) is an important theoretical and practical problem and has been extensively studied for decades. For massive graphs (e.g. modelling huge social networks), randomized algorithms are the answer as the exact computation is prohibitively complex, both for runtime and space. This paper concentrates on developing new accurate and efficient randomized algorithms that drastically cut the memory footprint and scale up the computation of the most influential nodes. Implementing the Reverse Influence Sampling method proposed by Borgs, Brautbar, Chayes and Lucier in 2013, we engineered a novel algorithm, CutTheTail (CTT), which solves the problem of influence maximization (IM) while using up to five orders of magnitude smaller space than the existing renown algorithms. CTT is a heuristic algorithm. We tested the accuracy of CTT on large real-world graphs using Monte Carlo simulation as the benchmark and comparing the quality of CTT solution to the algorithms with theoretically proven guaranteed approximation to optimal. Experiments show that CTT provides solutions with the quality equal to the quality of such algorithms. Savings in required space allow to successfully run CTT on a consumer-grade laptop for a graph with almost a billion of edges. To the best of our knowledge, no other IM algorithm can compute a solution on such a scale using a 16 GB RAM laptop.

Identifying influential nodes in heterogeneous networks

Identifying influential users and measure the influence of nodes in social networks have become an interesting and important topic of research. It is crucial to find out to what extent individuals influence each other because it can be used to control rumors, diseases, and diffusion. There are numerous relevant models most of which are based on a homogeneous network. However, in the real world, we face heterogeneous networks where the nodes and edges are different types. A network is homogeneous if and only if the edges and nodes are of the same type, and it is considered heterogeneous if the nodes and edges are different. In heterogeneous networks, there is a concept known as meta-path, which indicates the type of communication between two nodes. In this paper, we aim to locate influential nodes by calculating the entropy of different meta-paths. To evaluate information diffusion in a heterogeneous network, we used the known susceptible-infectious model. The results of our experiments on three real-world networks’ dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms.

Efficient approximation algorithms for adaptive influence maximization

Given a social network $G$ and an integer $k$, the influence maximization (IM) problem asks for a seed set $S$ of $k$ nodes from $G$ to maximize the expected number of nodes influenced via a propagation model. The majority of the existing algorithms for the IM problem are developed only under the non-adaptive setting, i.e., where all $k$ seed nodes are selected in one batch without observing how they influence other users in real world. In this paper, we study the adaptive IM problem where the $k$ seed nodes are selected in batches of equal size $b$, such that the $i$-th batch is identified after the actual influence results of the former $i-1$ batches are observed. In this paper, we propose the first practical algorithm for the adaptive IM problem that could provide the worst-case approximation guarantee of $1-\mathrm{e}^{\rho_b(\varepsilon-1)}$, where $\rho_b=1-(1-1/b)^b$ and $\varepsilon \in (0, 1)$ is a user-specified parameter. In particular, we propose a general framework AdaptGreedy that could be instantiated by any existing non-adaptive IM algorithms with expected approximation guarantee. Our approach is based on a novel randomized policy that is applicable to the general adaptive stochastic maximization problem, which may be of independent interest. In addition, we propose a novel non-adaptive IM algorithm called EPIC which not only provides strong expected approximation guarantee, but also presents superior performance compared with the existing IM algorithms. Meanwhile, we clarify some existing misunderstandings in recent work and shed light on further study of the adaptive IM problem. We conduct experiments on real social networks to evaluate our proposed algorithms comprehensively, and the experimental results strongly corroborate the superiorities and effectiveness of our approach.

Influence maximization algorithm based on cross propagation in location-based social networks

The problem of influence maximization is one of the key issues in social networks. Most of the current studies focus on online social networks while ignoring offline interpersonal relationship networks. Fortunately, the cross propagation considers the characteristics of both the online social networks and offline interpersonal relationship networks, which is more suitable for the real scenarios. In this paper, we design a cross propagation model based on location-based social networks to establish a connection between online social networks and offline interpersonal relationship networks. Where the offline interpersonal relationships are mined by the similarity of POIs, which are based on the encounter characteristics. Then, an influence maximization algorithm based on cross propagation model is provided. The simulation results indicate that the propagation effect of influence in cross propagation networks is better than that only in online social networks, and the proposed algorithm has higher performances in terms of the running time and the sphere of influence.

Efficient algorithms for budgeted influence maximization on massive social networks

Given a social network G , a cost associated with each node, and a budget B , the budgeted influence maximization (BIM) problem aims to find a set S of nodes, denoted as the seed set, that maximizes the expected number of influenced users under the constraint that the total cost of the users in S is no larger than B. The current state-of-the-art practical solution for BIM problem provides a (1-1/ e /2 --- ε)-approximate (≈ 0.316 --- ε) result and is still inefficient on large networks. We first show that we can improve the approximation guarantee to 1 --- 1/ e β --- ε where 1 --- 1/ e β = (1 --- β) (1 --- 1/ e ), achieving a better approximation guarantee (≈ 0.355 --- ε). Next, we apply the reverse sampling based technique, a popular technique for classic influence maximization, to our studied BIM problem. However, it is non-trivial to design efficient solutions for large scale networks even the reverse sampling based technique is applied. On one hand, it is unclear how to derive tight bounds for the nodes selected by the greedy algorithm under the budgeted scenario, where each time it selects the seed node with the highest benefit-cost ratio. With tighter bounds, the algorithm can terminate as soon as the approximation ratio is satisfied, thus saving the running cost. On the other hand, the number of nodes selected under BIM problem may be quite large since it may greedily select many nodes with large benefit-cost ratio but with low costs. The time complexity of existing influence maximization algorithms heavily depends on the size of the seed set. To tackle such challenging issues, we first present new bound estimation techniques for the BIM problem. Next, we present new node selection strategies to alleviate the dependency to the size of the seed set. Extensive experiments show that our proposed solution is far more efficient than alternatives.

Recurrent neural variational model for follower-based influence maximization

Influence Maximization, aiming at selecting a small set of seed users in a social network to maximize the spread of influence, has attracted considerable attention recently. Most of the existing influence maximization algorithms focus on the diffusion model of one single-entity, which assumes that only one entity is propagated by users in social network. However, the diffusion situations in real world social networks often involve multiple entities, competitive or complementary, spreading through the whole network, and are more complex than the situations of single independent entity.In this paper, we propose a novel optimization problem, namely, the follower-based influence maximization, which aims to promote a new product into the market by maximizing the influence of a social network where other competitive and complementary products have already been propagating. We tackle this problem by proposing a Recurrent Neural Variational model (RNV) and a follower-based greedy algorithm (RNVGA). The RNV model dynamically tracks entity correlations and cascade correlations through a deep generative model and recurrent neural variational inference, while the RNVGA algorithm applies the greedy approach for submodular maximization and efficiently computes the seed node set for the target product. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate effectiveness and efficiency of our method, and the results show the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

TSIM: A Two-Stage Selection Algorithm for Influence Maximization in Social Networks

The influence maximization problem is aimed at finding a small subset of nodes in a social./network to maximize the expected number of nodes influenced by these nodes. Influence maximization plays an important role in viral marketing and information diffusion. However, some existing algorithms for influence maximization in social networks perform badly in either efficiency or accuracy. In this paper, we put forward an efficient algorithm, called a two-stage selection for influence maximization in social networks (TSIM). Moreover, a discount-degree descending technology and lazy-forward technology are proposed, called DDLF, to select a certain number of influential nodes as candidate nodes. Firstly, we utilize the strategy to select a certain number of nodes as candidate nodes. Secondly, this paper proposes the maximum influence value function to estimate the marginal influence of each candidate node. Finally, we select seed nodes from candidate nodes according to their maximum influence value. The experimental results on six real-world social networks show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other contrast algorithms while considering accuracy and efficiency comprehensively.

LGIM: A Global Selection Algorithm Based on Local Influence for Influence Maximization in Social Networks

Influence maximization is to select k nodes from social networks to maximize the expected number of nodes activated by these selected nodes. Influence maximization problem plays a vital role in commercial marketing, news propagation, rumor control and public services. However, the existing algorithms for influence maximization usually tend to select one aspect from efficiency and accuracy as its main improving objective. This method of excessively pursuing one metric often leads to performing poorly in other metrics. Hence, we think that algorithms for influence maximization should make a suitable compromise between computation efficiency and result accuracy instead of excessively pursuing for one metric. Based on the above understanding, this paper proposes a new algorithm, called Global Selection Based on Local Influence (LGIM). The basic idea of the proposed algorithm is following: if a node can influence another node with large influence, the node also has large influence. Therefore, a two-stage filtering strategy of candidate nodes is proposed, which can reduce a large number of running time. Moreover, this paper also proposes a new objective function to estimate the influence spread of a node set. In summarize, the proposed algorithm utilizes the two-stage filtering strategy of candidate nodes to avoid unnecessary computation, and adopts a new objective function to replace time-consuming Monte-Carle simulations. Experimental results on six real-world social networks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other four comparison algorithms when comprehensively considering computation efficiency and result accuracy.

TPH: A Three-Phase-based Heuristic algorithm for influence maximization in social networks

Influence maximization is a fundamental problem, which is aimed to specify a small number of individuals as seed set to influence the largest number of individuals under a certain influence cascade model. Most existing works on influence maximization may have either high effectiveness or good efficiency,which can not balance both the effectiveness and efficiency. One of the reason is that they do not consider the effect of influence overlap on the effectiveness. That is, these works ignore the phenomenon that the same set of nodes may be influenced by a subset of different influential nodes. To tackle the effectiveness of heuristic algorithm, we propose a three-phase-based heuristic algorithm, called Three-Phase-based Heuristic (TPH), which uses K-shell method to find influential nodes firstly. Moreover, we utilize weighed degree to make up for the coarse-grained of K-shell method. At last, we take advantage of similarity index to reduce the effect of influence overlap by covering the similar neighbor nodes with low influence. Furthermore, exhaustive experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other baseline algorithms in the aspects of influence spread and running time.

Targeted Influence Maximization Based on Cloud Computing Over Big Data in Social Networks

This paper focuses on the targeted influence maximization based on cloud computing in social networks. Most of existing influence maximization works assume that the influence diffusion probabilities on edges are fixed, and identify the Top-k users to maximize the spread of influence assuming the knowledge of the entire network graph. However, in real-world scenarios, edge probabilities are typically different based on various topics, and may be affected by information received. Meanwhile, obtaining complete network data is difficult due to privacy and computational considerations. Moreover, existing influence maximization algorithms considering target users do not discuss cloud computing which lead to low computational efficiency when dealing with big datasets in social networks. To this end, this paper proposes a targeted influence maximization solution based on cloud computing. First, a new topic-aware model called tag-aware IC model is presented, which takes into account users' interests, characteristics of the item being propagated, and the similarity between users and the related information. Then, efficient algorithms with approximation guarantee are provided using a bounded number of queries to the graph structure. These methods aim to find a seed set that maximizes the expected influence spread over target users who are relevant to given topics. Finally, empirical studies of the proposed algorithms are designed and performed on real datasets. The experimental results show that the techniques in this paper achieves speedup and savings in storage compared with the state-of-the-art methods.