2,659 research outputs found
How to Influence People with Partial Incentives
We study the power of fractional allocations of resources to maximize
influence in a network. This work extends in a natural way the well-studied
model by Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos (2003), where a designer selects a
(small) seed set of nodes in a social network to influence directly, this
influence cascades when other nodes reach certain thresholds of neighbor
influence, and the goal is to maximize the final number of influenced nodes.
Despite extensive study from both practical and theoretical viewpoints, this
model limits the designer to a binary choice for each node, with no way to
apply intermediate levels of influence. This model captures some settings
precisely, e.g. exposure to an idea or pathogen, but it fails to capture very
relevant concerns in others, for example, a manufacturer promoting a new
product by distributing five "20% off" coupons instead of giving away one free
product.
While fractional versions of problems tend to be easier to solve than
integral versions, for influence maximization, we show that the two versions
have essentially the same computational complexity. On the other hand, the two
versions can have vastly different solutions: the added flexibility of
fractional allocation can lead to significantly improved influence. Our main
theoretical contribution is to show how to adapt the major positive results
from the integral case to the fractional case. Specifically, Mossel and Roch
(2006) used the submodularity of influence to obtain their integral results; we
introduce a new notion of continuous submodularity, and use this to obtain
matching fractional results. We conclude that we can achieve the same greedy
-approximation for the fractional case as the integral case.
In practice, we find that the fractional model performs substantially better
than the integral model, according to simulations on real-world social network
data
Adaptive Submodular Influence Maximization with Myopic Feedback
This paper examines the problem of adaptive influence maximization in social
networks. As adaptive decision making is a time-critical task, a realistic
feedback model has been considered, called myopic. In this direction, we
propose the myopic adaptive greedy policy that is guaranteed to provide a (1 -
1/e)-approximation of the optimal policy under a variant of the independent
cascade diffusion model. This strategy maximizes an alternative utility
function that has been proven to be adaptive monotone and adaptive submodular.
The proposed utility function considers the cumulative number of active nodes
through the time, instead of the total number of the active nodes at the end of
the diffusion. Our empirical analysis on real-world social networks reveals the
benefits of the proposed myopic strategy, validating our theoretical results.Comment: Accepted by IEEE/ACM International Conference Advances in Social
Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 201
MAXIMIZING THE SPEED OF INFLUENCE IN SOCIAL NETWORKS
Influence maximization in social networks is the problem of selecting a limited
size of influential users as seed nodes so that the influence from these seed nodes can propagate to the largest number of other nodes in the network. Previous studies in influence maximization focused on three areas, i.e., designing propagation models, improving algorithms of seed-node selection and exploiting the structure of social networks. However, most of these studies ignored the time constraint in influence propagation. In this paper, I studied how to maximize influence propagation in a given time, i.e., maximizing the speed of influence propagation in social networks. I extended the classic Independent Cascade (IC) model to a Continuous Dynamic Extended Independent Cascade (CDE-IC) model. In addition, I propose a novel heuristic algorithm and evaluate the algorithm using two large academic collaboration data sets from www.arXiv.org. Comparing with previous classic heuristic algorithms on the CDE-IC model, the new algorithm is 9%-18% faster in influence propagation. Furthermore, I gave solution to calculate propagation probability between adjacent nodes by exploiting the structure of social networks
Manipulating concept spread using concept relationships
The propagation of concepts in a population of agents is a form of influence spread, which can be modelled as a cascade from a set of initially activated individuals. The study of such influence cascades, in particular the identification of influential individuals, has a wide range of applications including epidemic control, viral marketing and the study of social norms. In real-world environments there may be many concepts spreading and interacting. These interactions can affect the spread of a given concept, either boosting it and allowing it to spread further, or inhibiting it and limiting its capability to spread. Previous work does not consider how the interactions between concepts affect concept spread. Taking concept interactions into consideration allows for indirect concept manipulation, meaning that we can affect concepts we are not able to directly control. In this paper, we consider the problem of indirect concept manipulation, and propose heuristics for indirectly boosting or inhibiting concept spread in environments where concepts interact. We define a framework that allows for the interactions between any number of concepts to be represented, and present a heuristic that aims to identify important influence paths for a given target concept in order to manipulate its spread. We compare the performance of this heuristic, called maximum probable gain, against established heuristics for manipulating influence spread
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