Influence Maximization In Social Networks Research Articles

Budget-Aware Local Influence Iterative Algorithm for Efficient Influence Maximization in Social Networks

The budgeted influence maximization (BIM) problem aims to identify a set of seed nodes that adhere to predefined budget constraints within a specified network structure and cost model. However, it is difficult for the existing algorithms to achieve a balance between timeliness and effectiveness. To address this challenge, our study initially proposes a refined cost model through empirical scrutiny of Weibo's quote data. Subsequently, we introduce a proxy-based algorithm, i.e., the budget-aware local influence iterative (BLII) algorithm tailored for the BIM problem, aimed at expediently identifying seed nodes. The algorithm approximates the global influence by leveraging the user’s one-hop influence and circumvents influence overlap among seed nodes via iterative influence updates. Comparative experiments involving eight algorithms across four real networks demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the BLII algorithm. In terms of influence spread, the proposed algorithm outperforms other proxy-based algorithms by 20%–255% and reaches the state-of-the-art simulation-based approach by 96%. In addition, the running time of the BLII algorithm is reasonable. Generally, the proposed cost model and BLII algorithm provide novel insights and potent tools for studying BIM problems.

An adaptive differential evolution algorithm driven by multiple probabilistic mutation strategies for influence maximization in social networks

Influence maximization is a critical research topic of social network analysis, particularly with the increasing involvement of individuals in the global networked society. The purpose of the problem is to identify k influential nodes from the social network and activate them initially to maximize the expected number of influenced nodes at the end of the spreading process. Although some meta-heuristics based on swarm intelligence or biological evolution have been proposed to tackle this intractable problem, further investigation is required to refine the exploration and exploitation operations based on the iterative information from the evolutionary process. In this paper, an adaptive differential evolution algorithm driven by multiple probabilistic mutation strategies is proposed for the influence maximization problem. In order to enhance the evolutionary capability of the later stages of the discrete differential evolution, the mutation in the framework, consisting of three policies, namely comprehensive learning particle swarm mutation strategy, differential mutation strategy, and perturbation strategy, is implied based on different probabilistic models. An adaptive local search strategy is presented to improve the local optimum results based on a potential alternative library consisting of structural hole nodes, which guides the differential evolution to find a more optimal solution. Experimental results on six real-world social networks demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of both efficacy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

The influence maximization algorithm for integrating attribute graph clustering and heterogeneous graph transformer

In social networks, maximizing influence is an important research direction. However, traditional influence maximization algorithms often overlook the attribute information of nodes and the heterogeneity of networks, leading to inefficiency and inaccuracy in the propagation process. To address this issue, this study first constructs a social network influence maximization propagation model, and then combines auto-encoder and graph convolutional autoencoder to extract social network user attributes. Finally, Transformer is used to learn the feature representation of social network nodes. Moreover, a heterogeneous graph neural network is introduced to combine with Transformer to further learn the feature representation of nodes, so as to design an influence maximization algorithm combining attributed graph clustering and heterogeneous graph Transformer. The results showed that the loss values of the fusion algorithm on different datasets were 0.619 and 0.17, respectively, proving its good fitting performance. The recall rate and F1 of this fusion algorithm were 92.5 % and 0.90, respectively, proving its high clustering accuracy. The influence maximization model based on fusion algorithm achieved active node coverage of 67 % and 48 % on two datasets, respectively, proving its good influence propagation effect. The above results demonstrate that the designed model can effectively spread influence. This helps to better understand and utilize the influence dissemination mechanisms in social networks, thereby promoting the development of social network research.

Graph convolutional networks with the self-attention mechanism for adaptive influence maximization in social networks

The influence maximization problem that has drawn a great deal of attention from researchers aims to identify a subset of influential spreaders that can maximize the expected influence spread in social networks. Existing works on the problem primarily concentrate on developing non-adaptive policies, where all seeds will be ignited at the very beginning of the diffusion after the identification. However, in non-adaptive policies, budget redundancy could occur as a result of some seeds being naturally infected by other active seeds during the diffusion process. In this paper, the adaptive seeding policies are investigated for the intractable adaptive influence maximization problem. Based on deep learning model, a novel approach named graph convolutional networks with self-attention mechanism (ATGCN) is proposed to address the adaptive influence maximization as a regression task. A controlling parameter is introduced for the adaptive seeding model to make a tradeoff between the spreading delay and influence coverage. The proposed approach leverages the self-attention mechanism to dynamically assign importance weight to node representations efficiently to capture the node influence feature information relevant to the adaptive influence maximization problem. Finally, intensive experimental findings on six real-world social networks demonstrate the superiorities of the adaptive seeding policy over the state-of-the-art baseline methods to the conventional influence maximization problem. Meanwhile, the proposed adaptive seeding policy ATGCN improves the influence spread rate by up to 7% in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art greedy-based adaptive seeding policy.

A cost-effective seed selection model for multi-constraint influence maximization in social networks

The Influence Maximization (IM) problem aims to maximize the diffusion of information or adoption of products among users within a social network by identifying and activating a set of initial users. It is not unrealistic to have a higher activation cost for more influential users in real-life applications. However, existing works on IM focus solely on finding the most influential users as the seed set, without considering either the activation costs of individual nodes and the total budget or the size of the seed set. This oversight may lead to infeasible solutions, particularly from financial and managerial perspectives, respectively. To address these issues, we propose a more realistic and generalized formulation called Multi-Constraint Influence Maximization (MCIM) to achieve a cost-effective solution under both budgetary and cardinality constraints. The MCIM model allows for variable-length solutions, necessitating the exclusion of seed nodes from the influence spread estimation. Consequently, unlike existing IM formulations, the spread function under the MCIM model is no longer monotonic but submodular. As it has also been proven to be an NP-hard problem, we propose a Simple Additive Weighting (SAW)-assisted Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm for solving large-size real-world IM problems. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation and algorithm in finding optimal and cost-effective solutions.

Fuzzy Influence Maximization in Social Networks

Influence maximization is a fundamental problem in social network analysis. This problem refers to the identification of a set of influential users as initial spreaders to maximize the spread of a message in a network. When such a message is spread, some users may be influenced by it. A common assumption of existing work is that the impact of a message is essentially binary: A user is either influenced (activated) or not influenced (non-activated). However, how strongly a user is influenced by a message may play an important role in this user’s attempt to influence subsequent users and spread the message further; existing methods may fail to model accurately the spreading process and identify influential users. In this article, we propose a novel approach to model a social network as a fuzzy graph where a fuzzy variable is used to represent the extent to which a user is influenced by a message (user’s activation level). By extending a diffusion model to simulate the spreading process in such a fuzzy graph, we conceptually formulate the fuzzy influence maximization problem for which three methods are proposed to identify influential users. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed methods in determining influential users in social networks.

Fairness-Aware Competitive Bidding Influence Maximization in Social Networks

Competitive influence maximization (CIM) has been studied for years due to its wide application in many domains. Most current studies primarily focus on the microlevel optimization by designing policies for one competitor to defeat its opponents. Furthermore, current studies ignore the fact that many influential nodes have their own starting prices, which may lead to inefficient budget allocation. In this article, we propose a novel competitive bidding influence maximization (CBIM) problem, where the competitors allocate budgets to bid for the seeds attributed to the platform during multiple bidding rounds. To solve the CBIM problem, we propose a fairness-aware multiagent CBIM (FMCBIM) framework. In this framework, we present a multiagent bidding particle environment (MBE) to model the competitors’ interactions and design a starting price adjustment mechanism to model the dynamic bidding environment. Moreover, we put forward a novel multiagent CBIM (MCBIM) algorithm to optimize competitors’ bidding policies. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that our work has good efficiency and effectiveness.

Neural attentive influence maximization model in social networks via reverse influence sampling on historical behavior sequences

Influence maximization in social networks aims to identify users with the highest influence in the network and leverage them as initial spreaders to maximize the revenue of influence. Recently, an increasing number of studies have drawn attention to the study of influence maximization in multi-entity social networks, achieving some degrees of success. However, most of them still have two major shortcomings. First, most of the previous work oversimplifies the correlation between the target entity and other entities, and overlooks the influence of user’s interest preference on information propagation. Second, the majority of existing methods face a trade-off between operational efficiency and solution accuracy, making it difficult to be effectively applied to large social networks. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a Deep neural network model based on Historical Behavior Sequences, named DHBS. DHBS consists of two core components: a Deep neural network model Incorporating Multi-head Self-attention, named DIMS; and a Reverse Influence Sampling algorithm based on Historical Behavior Sequence, named RIS-HBS. Specifically, DIMS captures the dynamic interest changes of users through its attention mechanism, enabling more accurate modeling of entity correlation in multi-entity social networks. RIS-HBS efficiently identifies a set of high-influential users for the target entity by incorporating the concept of reverse influence sampling. Experimental results on four publicly available network datasets demonstrate that DHBS outperforms baseline methods in terms of prediction accuracy, expected spread, and scalability, and DIMS plays a key role on RIS-HBS in the DHBS model.

Influence Maximization in Social Networks Using an Improved Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract The influence maximization (IM) problem has received great attention in the field of social network analysis, and its analysis results can provide reliable basis for decision makers when promoting products or political viewpoints. IM problem aims to select a set of seed users from social networks and maximize the number of users expected to be influenced. Most previous studies on the IM problem focused only on the single-objective problem of maximizing the influence spread of the seed set, ignoring the cost of the seed set, which causes decision makers to be unable to develop effective management strategies. In this work, the IM problem is formulated as a multi-objective IM problem that considers the cost of the seed set. An improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization (IMOPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. In the IMOPSO algorithm, the initialization strategy of Levy flight based on degree value is used to improve the quality of the initial solution, and the local search strategy based on greedy mechanism is designed to improve the Pareto Frontier distribution and promote algorithm convergence. Experimental results on six real social networks demonstrate that the proposed IMOPSO algorithm is effective, reducing runtime while providing competitive solutions.

Fair Influence Maximization in Social Networks: A Community-Based Evolutionary Algorithm

Fair Influence Maximization in Social Networks: A Community-Based Evolutionary Algorithm

Enhanced Group Influence Maximization in Social Networks Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Enhanced Group Influence Maximization in Social Networks Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Influence maximization in social networks using community-diversified seed selection

Abstract The community-based influence maximization in social networks refers to the strategy of amplifying the influence by leveraging the underlying connectivity patterns of the online communities. This promotes the widespread dissemination of user-generated content across socially connected entities. In our work, we have combined the simplicity of degree centrality and the bridging strength of betweenness for maximizing the influence performance. We have used community detection for partitioning the whole network into smaller subnetworks for intelligent distribution of seed nodes among these communities for improving the rate of information spreading. The proposed ranking, named as Community Diversified Seed Selection, is compared with degree centrality and betweenness centrality-based ranking in terms of rate of spreading, absolute execution time and algorithmic time complexity. The comparative study was performed on LFRμ= 0.01, LFRμ= 0.02 and LFRμ= 0.03 benchmark networks, and validated using Facebook real-world social network. Our proposed algorithm has better and faster spreading with reasonable time complexity, therefore, making it a suitable choice for larger networks.

Influence Maximization in social networks using discretized Harris’ Hawks Optimization algorithm

Influence Maximization (IM) is the task of determining k optimal influential nodes in a social network to maximize the influence spread using a propagation model. IM is a prominent problem for viral marketing and helps significantly in social media advertising. Previous Greedy and Reverse Influence Sampling-based IM approaches are ineffective in real-world social networks due to their significant computational cost and execution time. Further, even heuristic approaches applied to IM generally yield minimal performance gain relative to the decreased time complexity. This presents a challenge in developing cost-effective algorithms with low execution time that can handle diverse social networks. In this paper, we propose the discretization of the nature-inspired Harris’ Hawks Optimization meta-heuristic algorithm using community structures for optimal selection of seed nodes for influence spread. In addition to Harris’ Hawks’ intelligence, we employ a neighbor scout strategy algorithm to avoid blindness and enhance the searching ability of the hawks. Further, we use a candidate nodes-based random population initialization approach, and these candidate nodes aid in accelerating the convergence process for the entire populace, reducing the total computational cost. We evaluate the efficacy of our proposed DHHO approach on eight social networks using the Independent Cascade model for information diffusion. We observe that DHHO is comparable or better than competing meta-heuristic approaches for Influence Maximization across five metrics, and performs noticeably better than competing heuristic approaches.

Balanced influence maximization in social networks based on deep reinforcement learning

Balanced influence maximization aims to balance the influence maximization of multiple different entities in social networks and avoid the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Recently, an increasing number of studies have drawn attention to the study of balanced influence maximization in social networks and achieves success to some extent. However, most of them still have two major shortcomings. First, the previous works mainly focus on spreading the influence of multiple target entities to more users, ignoring the potential influence of the correlation between the target entities and other entities on information propagation in real social networks. Second, the existing methods require a large amount of diffusion sampling for influence estimation, making it difficult to apply to large social networks. To this end, we propose a Balanced Influence Maximization framework based on Deep Reinforcement Learning named BIM-DRL, which consists of two core components: an entity correlation evaluation module and a balanced seed node selection module. Specifically, in the entity correlation evaluation module, an entity correlation evaluation model based on the users’ historical behavior sequences is proposed, which can accurately evaluate the impact of entity correlation on information propagation. In the balanced seed node selection module, a balanced influence maximization model based on deep reinforcement learning is designed to train the parameters in the objective function, and then a set of seed nodes that maximize the balanced influence is found. Extensive experiments on six real-life network datasets demonstrate the superiority of the BIM-DRL over state-of-the-art methods on the metrics of balanced influence spread and balanced propagation accuracy.

Group Equality in Adaptive Submodular Maximization

In this paper, we study the classic submodular maximization problem subject to a group equality constraint under both nonadaptive and adaptive settings. It is shown that the utility function of many machine learning applications, including data summarization, influence maximization in social networks, and personalized recommendation, satisfies the property of submodularity. Hence, maximizing a submodular function subject to various constraints can be found at the heart of many of those applications. On a high level, submodular maximization aims to select a group of most representative items (e.g., data points). However, the design of most existing algorithms does not incorporate the fairness constraint, leading to underrepresentation or overrepresentation of some particular groups. This motivates us to study the submodular maximization problem with group equality, in which we aim to select a group of items to maximize a (possibly nonmonotone) submodular utility function subject to a group equality constraint. To this end, we develop the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for this problem. The design of our algorithm is robust enough to be extended to solving the submodular maximization problem under a more complicated adaptive setting. Moreover, we further extend our study to incorporating a global cardinality constraint and other fairness notations. History: Accepted by Andrea Lodi, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Discrete. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0384 .

A Search Space Reduction-Based Progressive Evolutionary Algorithm for Influence Maximization in Social Networks

Influence maximization (IM) problem, which selects a subset of nodes from a social network to maximize the influence spread, appeals to numerous scholars. Since the IM problem is NP-hard, it is still an arduous task to achieve good results in terms of influence spread and running time at the same time. This article proposes a novel search space reduction strategy-based progressive evolutionary algorithm (SSR-PEA) for solving IM problems effectively and efficiently. In SSR-PEA, a novel search space reduction strategy (SSR) in the light of the power-law distribution of the social network is designed to reduce the computational overheads, which eliminates a great deal of less influential nodes in a sensible way. After that, we propose a progressive evolutionary framework based on SSR, where the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math> </inline-formula>-element individual is optimized on the basis of the (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math> </inline-formula>-1)-element individual to speed up the optimal solution search process. Experimental results on ten real-world networks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm SSR-PEA can achieve 98<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math> </inline-formula> of the influence spread achieved by cost-effective lazy forward (CELF) on average, and its running time is two or even three orders of magnitude shorter. Thus, SSR-PEA strikes a better balance between effectiveness and efficiency.

Influence maximization in social networks based on discrete harris hawks optimization algorithm

Influence maximization in social networks based on discrete harris hawks optimization algorithm

Exploiting community and structural hole spanner for influence maximization in social networks

AbstractViral marketing is a frequently used social marketing strategy which aims to promote products on various social media. In order to devise an efficient viral marketing strategy, influence maximization problem is widely studied in social networks. Influence maximization problem tries to find a set of influential users who could influence social users maximally. However, existed influence maximization algorithms could not satisfy the needs of social marketers well. In social networks, community structure is an important feature where social users are closely connected together in groups, and structural hole spanners are those users who bridge different communities. In order to balance the effectiveness and efficiency of viral marketing in social networks, in this paper, we present to exploit the community structure and structural hole spanners in social networks for solving the influence maximization problem. Different to traditional algorithms, we devise a strategy to approximate social influences of social users to find seeds efficiently. In particular, for an internal user inside a community in social networks, we utilize his social influence to members inside this community to approximate his social influence in the whole social network. For a structural hole spanner who bridges multiple communities, we utilize his social influence to members in these communities to approximate his social influence in the whole network. Based on the approximate social influence, information diffusion model and greedy framework, we propose a Community and Structural Hole Spanner based Greedy (CSHS‐G) algorithm which devises several influence lists to store social influences of users and fast computation scheme to find seeds. Besides, to further improve the efficiency, we propose a Community and Structural Hole Spanner based Heuristic (CSHS‐H) algorithm which approximates social influences of structural hole spanners by utilizing their 2‐hops influences. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation on the crawled real‐world data set. Experimental results show that, compared to all of the baseline algorithms, our proposed algorithms not only have high efficiency, but also could guarantee larger influence spread.

Community-based influence maximization in social networks under a competitive linear threshold model considering positive and negative user views

Social networks are a collection of people or groups and interactions between them, which can include friendship activities or business relationships, and they play an important role in spreading information and maximizing influence on users. The effect of social networks in our daily life is undeniable and it shows new methods of communication and is used as a medium to spread news, opinions, thoughts and any other kind of information. The main goal in influence maximization is to find a subset of key users that maximize influence expansion under a particular diffusion model. A number of studies over the past several years have tried to solve this problem by considering a nonracist environment where there is only one player without competitors, whereas in the real world, there is always more than one player competing with other players. To influence most nodes, this problem is called competitive influence maximization (CIM). Therefore, we try to solve the problem of maximizing the competitive influence by proposing a new diffusion model, considering two positive and negative views towards advertising, which is an extension of the linear threshold (LT) model with the ability to decide on the expansion of input influence and leads to an improvement in selecting seeds with better quality and also by extracting the community structure from the input graph, it is used to calculate the expansion of each node locally within its own community, and by preventing the repetition of penetration calculations for each node, it significantly reduces the execution time. The purpose of the proposed algorithm is to find the minimum number of seed nodes that can achieve more expansion compared to the expansion of nodes selected by other competitors in an acceptable execution time. Real-world experiments and synthetic datasets show that the proposed approach can obtain the minimum node required to defeat the competitor more realistically and in less time. Competitor leads to budget cuts by reducing the number of seeds required to defeat. The obtained results show that if [Formula: see text] seed nodes are needed to defeat the competitor, the execution time of the proposed algorithm will be approximately [Formula: see text].

A Hurst‐based diffusion model using time series characteristics for influence maximization in social networks

AbstractOnline social networks have grown exponentially in the recent years while finding applications in real life like marketing, recommendation systems, and social awareness campaigns. An important research area in this field is Influence Maximization, which pertains to finding methods for maximizing the spread of information (influence) across an OSN. Existing works in IM widely use a pre‐defined edge propagation probability for node activation. Hurst exponent (H), which depicts the self‐similarity in the time series depicting a user's past interaction behaviour, has also been used as activation criteria. In this work, we propose a Time Series Characteristic based Hurst‐based Diffusion Model (TSC‐HDM), which calculates H based on the stationary or non‐stationary characteristic of the time series. TSC‐HDM selects a handful of seed nodes and activates a seed node's inactive successor only if H &gt; 0.5. The proposed model has been tested on four real‐world OSN datasets. The results have been compared against four other IM models – Independent Cascade, Weighted Cascade, Trivalency, and Hurst‐based Influence Maximization. TSC‐HDM is found to have achieved as much as 590% higher expected influence spread as compared to the other models. Moreover, TSC‐HDM has attained 344% better average influence spread than other state‐of‐the‐art models namely LIR, A‐Greedy, LPIMA, Genetic Algorithm with Dynamic Probabilities, NeighborsRemove, DegreeDecrease, IGIM, IRR, and PHG.