Influence Maximization In Networks Research Articles

Adversarial Socialbots Modeling Based on Structural Information Principles

The importance of effective detection is underscored by the fact that socialbots imitate human behavior to propagate misinformation, leading to an ongoing competition between socialbots and detectors. Despite the rapid advancement of reactive detectors, the exploration of adversarial socialbot modeling remains incomplete, significantly hindering the development of proactive detectors. To address this issue, we propose a mathematical Structural Information principles-based Adversarial Socialbots Modeling framework, namely SIASM, to enable more accurate and effective modeling of adversarial behaviors. First, a heterogeneous graph is presented to integrate various users and rich activities in the original social network and measure its dynamic uncertainty as structural entropy. By minimizing the high-dimensional structural entropy, a hierarchical community structure of the social network is generated and referred to as the optimal encoding tree. Secondly, a novel method is designed to quantify influence by utilizing the assigned structural entropy, which helps reduce the computational cost of SIASM by filtering out uninfluential users. Besides, a new conditional structural entropy is defined between the socialbot and other users to guide the follower selection for network influence maximization. Extensive and comparative experiments on both homogeneous and heterogeneous social networks demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art baselines, the proposed SIASM framework yields substantial performance improvements in terms of network influence (up to 16.32%) and sustainable stealthiness (up to 16.29%) when evaluated against a robust detector with 90% accuracy.

Heterogeneous network influence maximization algorithm based on multi-scale propagation strength and repulsive force of propagation field

Heterogeneous networks, like social and academic networks are widespread in the real world, characterized by diverse nodes and complex relationships. Influence maximization is a crucial research topic, in these networks, as it can help in comprehending the mechanisms of information propagation and diffusion. Effectively utilizing complex structural information poses a challenge in current research on influence maximization in heterogeneous information networks. As a solution to this problem, a heterogeneous network influence maximization algorithm based on the multi-scale propagation strength and repulsive force of propagation field is proposed. Firstly, based on the propagation field, we design a multi-scale propagation strength index for the propagation ability of nodes to achieve maximum coverage of influence propagation. Specifically, in the homogeneous structure, the homogeneous propagation strength describes the propagation ability of nodes. In the heterogeneous structure, the heterogeneous shallow propagation strength and the heterogeneous deep propagation strength are designed to exploit the local and global spreading ability of nodes using meta-paths and link prediction based on graph neural networks, respectively. Secondly, to ensure the minimum overlap in the propagation range of seed nodes, we designed the overlapping repulsive force between node pairs in the propagation field. Finally, considering the complexity of the propagation process of heterogeneous information networks, an independent cascade model based on meta-paths is proposed. Based on experiments conducted with several datasets, our algorithm outperforms baseline algorithms for solving influence maximization problem.

Submodular maximization over data streams with differential privacy noise

In the big data era, data often comes in the form of streams and fast data stream analysis has recently attracted intensive research interest. Submodular optimization naturally appears in many streaming data applications such as social network influence maximization with the property of diminishing returns. However, in a practical setting, streaming data frequently comes with noises that are small but significant enough to impact the optimality of submodular optimization solutions. Following the framework of differential privacy (DP), this paper considers a streaming model with DP noise that is small by construction. Within this noisy streaming model, the paper strives to address the general problem of submodular maximization with a cardinality constraint. The main theoretical result we obtained is a streaming algorithm that is one-pass and has an approximation guarantee of 1(2+(1+1k)2)(1+1k)−δ for any δ>0. Finally, we implement the algorithm and evaluate it against several baseline methods. Numerical results support the practical performance of our algorithm across several real datasets.

Optimal Influence Design in Networks

Optimal Influence Design in Networks

A quick GRASP-based method for influence maximization in social networks

The evolution and spread of social networks have attracted the interest of the scientific community in the last few years. Specifically, several new interesting problems, which are hard to solve, have arisen in the context of viral marketing, disease analysis, and influence analysis, among others. Companies and researchers try to find the elements that maximize profit, stop pandemics, etc. This family of problems is collected under the term Social Network Influence Maximization problem (SNIMP), whose goal is to find the most influential users (commonly known as seeds) in a social network, simulating an influence diffusion model. SNIMP is known to be an mathcal {NP}-hard problem and, therefore, an exact algorithm is not suitable for solving it optimally in reasonable computing time. The main drawback of this optimization problem lies on the computational effort required to evaluate a solution. Since each node is infected with a certain probability, the objective function value must be calculated through a Monte Carlo simulation, resulting in a computationally complex process. The current proposal tries to overcome this limitation by considering a metaheuristic algorithm based on the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) framework to design a quick solution procedure for the SNIMP. Our method consists of two distinct stages: construction and local search. The former is based on static features of the network, which notably increases its efficiency since it does not require to perform any simulation during construction. The latter involves a local search based on an intelligent neighborhood exploration strategy to find the most influential users based on swap moves, also aiming for an efficient processing. Experiments performed on 7 well-known social network datasets with 5 different seed set sizes confirm that the proposed algorithm is able to provide competitive results in terms of quality and computing time when comparing it with the best algorithms found in the state of the art.

Link-based influence maximization in networks of health promotion professionals.

The influence maximization problem (IMP) as classically formulated is based on the strong assumption that “chosen” nodes always adopt the new product. In this paper we propose a new influence maximization problem, referred to as the “Link-based Influence Maximization Problem” (LIM), which differs from IMP in that the decision variable of the spreader has changed from choosing an optimal seed to selecting an optimal node to influence in order to maximize the spread. Based on our proof that LIM is NP-hard with a monotonic increasing and submodular target function, we propose a greedy algorithm, GLIM, for optimizing LIM and use numerical simulation to explore the performance in terms of spread and computation time in different network types. The results indicate that the performance of LIM varies across network types. We illustrate LIM by applying it in the context of a Dutch national health promotion program for prevention of youth obesity within a network of Dutch schools. GLIM is seen to outperform the other methods in all network types at the cost of a higher computation time. These results suggests that GLIM may be utilized to increase the effectiveness of health promotion programs.

On the influence maximization problem and the percolation phase transition

We analyze the problem of network influence maximization in the uniform independent cascade model: Given a network with N nodes and a probability p for a node to contaminate a neighbor, find a set of k initially contaminated nodes that maximizes the expected number of eventually contaminated nodes. This problem is of interest theoretically and for many applications in social networks. Unfortunately, it is a NP-hard problem. Using Percolation Theory, we show that in practice the problem is hard only in a vanishing neighborhood of a critical value p=pc. For p>pc there exists a “Giant Cluster” of order N, that is easily found in finite time. For p<pc the clusters are finite, and one can find one of them in finite time (independent of N). Thus, for most social networks in the real world the solution time does not scale with the size of the network.

Influence Maximization in Signed Networks by Enhancing the Negative Influence

With the advancement of science and technology, research on influence maximization in networks has become a hot spot. In social networks, there is not only a positive relationship among nodes but also a negative impact, and the negative impact often plays a greater role than the positive impact, as observed for shopping websites or online votes. This paper proposes a method based on an independent cascade model by emphasizing the negative impact in symbolic networks to solve the problem of influence maximization. First, an algorithm that is based on an independent path and that emphasizes negative influence is designed to obtain the probability among nodes. Based on the activation probability, an algorithm is proposed to identify nodes that could have the greatest impact on the influence increment from the seeds. Finally, the seed set is confirmed based on the influence in the corresponding symbol network. In the experiment performed on real-world network data, the result indicate that the proposed algorithm causes more substantial influence propagation than do other algorithms.

Research on the Dynamic Multisocial Networks Influence Maximization Problem Based on Common Users

The influence maximization problem of a single social network is to find a set of $k$ seed nodes $S$ so that the spread of information from the seed set to the single network has the largest influence. This problem has attracted the attention of many researchers worldwide. In recent years, with the rapid development of the internet and the popularity of social networks, a variety of social platforms have appeared, allowing people to have multiple social accounts simultaneously; that is, one person will participate in multiple social networks and spread information on the various social platforms simultaneously. Consequently, the problem of influence maximization has been extended from a single social network to multiple social networks. However, many studies are based on static networks, and the critical challenge is that social networks usually have dynamic characteristics. At present, there is almost no research on dynamic multiple social networks. Therefore, based on common users, this paper establishes a dynamic multisocial network communication model to study the dynamic multisocial network influence maximization problem (DMNIMP). In this model, multiple dynamic networks are merged into a dynamic network, in which the self-propagating edges of common users are added to the snapshots of each frame of the integrated network. Experimental analysis shows that the proposed model can not only accurately and vividly represent dynamic characteristics but also reflect the mutual influence of common users on multiple social networks. If common users are chosen as the nodes with greater influence in each network, the communication range of the integrated network is obviously larger than that of a single network, and the interaction of dynamic multisocial networks is more obvious.

Big social network influence maximization via recursively estimating influence spread

Influence maximization aims to find a set of highly influential nodes in a social network to maximize the spread of influence. Although the problem has been widely studied, it is still challenging to design algorithms to meet three requirements simultaneously, i.e., fast computation, guaranteed accuracy, and low memory consumption that scales well to a big network. Existing heuristic algorithms are scalable but suffer from unguaranteed accuracy. Greedy algorithms such as CELF [1] are accurate with theoretical guarantee but incur heavy simulation cost in calculating the influence spread. Moreover, static greedy algorithms are accurate and sufficiently fast, but they suffer extensive memory cost. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to enable greedy algorithms to perform well in big social network influence maximization. Our algorithm recursively estimates the influence spread using reachable probabilities from node to node. We provide three strategies that integrate memory cost and computing efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the high accuracy of our influence estimation. The proposed algorithm is more than 500 times faster than the CELF algorithm on four real world data sets.

On the Upper Bounds of Spread for Greedy Algorithms in Social Network Influence Maximization

Influence maximization, defined as finding a small subset of nodes that maximizes spread of influence in social networks, is NP-hard under both Independent Cascade (IC) and Linear Threshold (LT) models, where many greedy-based algorithms have been proposed with the best approximation guarantee. However, existing greedy-based algorithms are inefficient on large networks, as it demands heavy Monte-Carlo simulations of the spread functions for each node at the initial step [7] . In this paper, we establish new upper bounds to significantly reduce the number of Monte-Carlo simulations in greedy-based algorithms, especially at the initial step. We theoretically prove that the bound is tight and convergent when the summation of weights towards (or from) each node is less than 1. Based on the bound, we propose a new Upper Bound based Lazy Forward algorithm ( UBLF in short) for discovering the top-k influential nodes in social networks. We test and compare UBLF with prior greedy algorithms, especially CELF [30] . Experimental results show that UBLF reduces more than 95 percent Monte-Carlo simulations of CELF and achieves about $2\hbox{-}10$ times speedup when the seed set is small.

A Note on Influence Maximization in Social Networks from Local to Global and Beyond

In this paper, we study a new problem on social network influence maximization. The problem is defined as, given an acti- vatable set A and a targeted set T, finding the k nodes in A with the maximal influence in T . Different from existing influence maximization work which aims to find a small subset of nodes to maximize the spread of influence over the entire network (i.e., from whole to whole), our problem aims to find a small subset of given activatable nodes which can maximize the influence spread to a targeted subset (i.e., from part to part). Theoretically the new frame includes the common influence maximization as its special case. The solution is critical for personalized services, targeted information dissemination, and local viral mar- keting on social networks, where fully understanding of constraint influence diffusion is essential. To this end, in this paper we propose a constraint influence maximization frame. Specifically, we point out that it is NP-hard and can be approximated by greedy algorithm with guarantee of 1 − 1/e. We also elaborate two special cases: the local one and the global one. Besides, we present the works that are related and beyond.