5,201 research outputs found
Finding influential users for different time bounds in social networks using multi-objective optimization
Online social networks play an important role in marketing services. Influence maximization is a major challenge, in which the goal is to find the most influential users in a social network. Increasing the number of influenced users at the end of a diffusion process while decreasing the time of diffusion are two main objectives of the influence maximization problem. The goal of this paper is to find multiple sets of influential users such that each of them is the best set to spread influence for a specific time bound. Considering two conflicting objectives, increasing influence and decreasing diffusion time, we employ the NSGA-II algorithm which is a powerful algorithm in multi-objective optimization to find different seed sets with high influence at different diffusion times. Since social networks are large, computing influence and diffusion time of all chromosomes in each iteration will be challenging and computationally expensive. Therefore, we propose two methods which can estimate the expected influence and diffusion time of a seed set in an efficient manner. Providing the set of all potentially optimal solutions helps a decision maker evaluate the trade-offs between the two objectives, i.e., the number of influenced users and diffusion time. In addition, we develop an approach for selecting seed sets, which have optimal influence for specific time bounds, from the resulting Pareto front of the NSGA-II. Finally, we show that applying our algorithm to real social networks outperforms existing algorithms for the influence maximization problem. The results show a good compromise between the two objectives and the final seed sets result in high influence for different time bounds
Influence Maximization in Social Networks: A Survey
Online social networks have become an important platform for people to
communicate, share knowledge and disseminate information. Given the widespread
usage of social media, individuals' ideas, preferences and behavior are often
influenced by their peers or friends in the social networks that they
participate in. Since the last decade, influence maximization (IM) problem has
been extensively adopted to model the diffusion of innovations and ideas. The
purpose of IM is to select a set of k seed nodes who can influence the most
individuals in the network.
In this survey, we present a systematical study over the researches and
future directions with respect to IM problem. We review the information
diffusion models and analyze a variety of algorithms for the classic IM
algorithms. We propose a taxonomy for potential readers to understand the key
techniques and challenges. We also organize the milestone works in time order
such that the readers of this survey can experience the research roadmap in
this field. Moreover, we also categorize other application-oriented IM studies
and correspondingly study each of them. What's more, we list a series of open
questions as the future directions for IM-related researches, where a potential
reader of this survey can easily observe what should be done next in this
field
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