12,593 research outputs found
From Competition to Complementarity: Comparative Influence Diffusion and Maximization
Influence maximization is a well-studied problem that asks for a small set of
influential users from a social network, such that by targeting them as early
adopters, the expected total adoption through influence cascades over the
network is maximized. However, almost all prior work focuses on cascades of a
single propagating entity or purely-competitive entities. In this work, we
propose the Comparative Independent Cascade (Com-IC) model that covers the full
spectrum of entity interactions from competition to complementarity. In Com-IC,
users' adoption decisions depend not only on edge-level information
propagation, but also on a node-level automaton whose behavior is governed by a
set of model parameters, enabling our model to capture not only competition,
but also complementarity, to any possible degree. We study two natural
optimization problems, Self Influence Maximization and Complementary Influence
Maximization, in a novel setting with complementary entities. Both problems are
NP-hard, and we devise efficient and effective approximation algorithms via
non-trivial techniques based on reverse-reachable sets and a novel "sandwich
approximation". The applicability of both techniques extends beyond our model
and problems. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithms consistently
outperform intuitive baselines in four real-world social networks, often by a
significant margin. In addition, we learn model parameters from real user
action logs.Comment: An abridged of this work is to appear in the Proceedings of VLDB
Endowment (PVDLB), Vol 9, No 2. Also, the paper will be presented in the VLDB
2016 conference in New Delhi, India. This update contains new theoretical and
experimental results, and the paper is now in single-column format (44 pages
Flow-based Influence Graph Visual Summarization
Visually mining a large influence graph is appealing yet challenging. People
are amazed by pictures of newscasting graph on Twitter, engaged by hidden
citation networks in academics, nevertheless often troubled by the unpleasant
readability of the underlying visualization. Existing summarization methods
enhance the graph visualization with blocked views, but have adverse effect on
the latent influence structure. How can we visually summarize a large graph to
maximize influence flows? In particular, how can we illustrate the impact of an
individual node through the summarization? Can we maintain the appealing graph
metaphor while preserving both the overall influence pattern and fine
readability?
To answer these questions, we first formally define the influence graph
summarization problem. Second, we propose an end-to-end framework to solve the
new problem. Our method can not only highlight the flow-based influence
patterns in the visual summarization, but also inherently support rich graph
attributes. Last, we present a theoretic analysis and report our experiment
results. Both evidences demonstrate that our framework can effectively
approximate the proposed influence graph summarization objective while
outperforming previous methods in a typical scenario of visually mining
academic citation networks.Comment: to appear in IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM),
Shen Zhen, China, December 201
Maximizing Welfare in Social Networks under a Utility Driven Influence Diffusion Model
Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence
maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is
to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a
large cascade of adoptions by others. Existing works have three key
limitations. (1) They do not account for economic considerations of a user in
buying/adopting items. (2) Most studies on multiple items focus on competition,
with complementary items receiving limited attention. (3) For the network
owner, maximizing social welfare is important to ensure customer loyalty, which
is not addressed in prior work in the IM literature. In this paper, we address
all three limitations and propose a novel model called UIC that combines
utility-driven item adoption with influence propagation over networks. Focusing
on the mutually complementary setting, we formulate the problem of social
welfare maximization in this novel setting. We show that while the objective
function is neither submodular nor supermodular, surprisingly a simple greedy
allocation algorithm achieves a factor of of the optimum
expected social welfare. We develop \textsf{bundleGRD}, a scalable version of
this approximation algorithm, and demonstrate, with comprehensive experiments
on real and synthetic datasets, that it significantly outperforms all
baselines.Comment: 33 page
Probing Limits of Information Spread with Sequential Seeding
We consider here information spread which propagates with certain probability
from nodes just activated to their not yet activated neighbors. Diffusion
cascades can be triggered by activation of even a small set of nodes. Such
activation is commonly performed in a single stage. A novel approach based on
sequential seeding is analyzed here resulting in three fundamental
contributions. First, we propose a coordinated execution of randomized choices
to enable precise comparison of different algorithms in general. We apply it
here when the newly activated nodes at each stage of spreading attempt to
activate their neighbors. Then, we present a formal proof that sequential
seeding delivers at least as large coverage as the single stage seeding does.
Moreover, we also show that, under modest assumptions, sequential seeding
achieves coverage provably better than the single stage based approach using
the same number of seeds and node ranking. Finally, we present experimental
results showing how single stage and sequential approaches on directed and
undirected graphs compare to the well-known greedy approach to provide the
objective measure of the sequential seeding benefits. Surprisingly, applying
sequential seeding to a simple degree-based selection leads to higher coverage
than achieved by the computationally expensive greedy approach currently
considered to be the best heuristic
Optimizing spread dynamics on graphs by message passing
Cascade processes are responsible for many important phenomena in natural and
social sciences. Simple models of irreversible dynamics on graphs, in which
nodes activate depending on the state of their neighbors, have been
successfully applied to describe cascades in a large variety of contexts. Over
the last decades, many efforts have been devoted to understand the typical
behaviour of the cascades arising from initial conditions extracted at random
from some given ensemble. However, the problem of optimizing the trajectory of
the system, i.e. of identifying appropriate initial conditions to maximize (or
minimize) the final number of active nodes, is still considered to be
practically intractable, with the only exception of models that satisfy a sort
of diminishing returns property called submodularity. Submodular models can be
approximately solved by means of greedy strategies, but by definition they lack
cooperative characteristics which are fundamental in many real systems. Here we
introduce an efficient algorithm based on statistical physics for the
optimization of trajectories in cascade processes on graphs. We show that for a
wide class of irreversible dynamics, even in the absence of submodularity, the
spread optimization problem can be solved efficiently on large networks.
Analytic and algorithmic results on random graphs are complemented by the
solution of the spread maximization problem on a real-world network (the
Epinions consumer reviews network).Comment: Replacement for "The Spread Optimization Problem
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