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Influence Maximization with Bandits
We consider the problem of \emph{influence maximization}, the problem of
maximizing the number of people that become aware of a product by finding the
`best' set of `seed' users to expose the product to. Most prior work on this
topic assumes that we know the probability of each user influencing each other
user, or we have data that lets us estimate these influences. However, this
information is typically not initially available or is difficult to obtain. To
avoid this assumption, we adopt a combinatorial multi-armed bandit paradigm
that estimates the influence probabilities as we sequentially try different
seed sets. We establish bounds on the performance of this procedure under the
existing edge-level feedback as well as a novel and more realistic node-level
feedback. Beyond our theoretical results, we describe a practical
implementation and experimentally demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness
on four real datasets.Comment: 12 page
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