A Social Influence Model Based On Circuit Theory

Understanding the behaviors of information propagation is essential for the effective exploitation of social influence in social networks. However, few existing influence models are tractable and efficient for describing the information propagation process, especially when dealing with the difficulty of incorporating the effects of combined influences from multiple nodes. To this end, in this paper, we provide a social influence model that alleviates this obstacle based on electrical circuit theory. This model vastly improves the efficiency of measuring the influence strength between any pair of nodes, and can be used to interpret the real-world influence propagation process in a coherent way. In addition, this circuit theory model provides a natural solution to the social influence maximization problem. When applied to realworld data, the circuit theory model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can greatly alleviate the computation burden of the influence maximization problem

A Linear Circuit Model For Social Influence Analysis

Understanding the behaviors of information propagation is essential for the effective exploitation of social influence in social networks. However, few existing influence models are both tractable and efficient for describing the information propagation process and quantitatively measuring social influence. To this end, in this paper, we develop a linear social influence model, named Circuit due to its close relation to the circuit network. Based on the predefined four axioms of social influence, we first demonstrate that our model can efficiently measure the influence strength between any pair of nodes. Along this line, an upper bound of the node(s)' influence is identified for potential use, e.g., reducing the search space. Furthermore, we provide the physical implication of the Circuit model and also a deep analysis of its relationships with the existing methods, such as PageRank. Then, we propose that the Circuit model provides a natural solution to the problems of computing each single node's authority and finding a set of nodes for social influence maximization. At last, the effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated on the real-world data. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that Circuit model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can greatly alleviate the computation burden of the influence maximization problem.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1205.602