2 research outputs found
A Multi-Transformation Evolutionary Framework for Influence Maximization in Social Networks
Influence maximization is a crucial issue for mining the deep information of
social networks, which aims to select a seed set from the network to maximize
the number of influenced nodes. To evaluate the influence spread of a seed set
efficiently, existing studies have proposed transformations with lower
computational costs to replace the expensive Monte Carlo simulation process.
These alternate transformations, based on network prior knowledge, induce
different search behaviors with similar characteristics to various
perspectives. Specifically, it is difficult for users to determine a suitable
transformation a priori. This article proposes a multi-transformation
evolutionary framework for influence maximization (MTEFIM) with convergence
guarantees to exploit the potential similarities and unique advantages of
alternate transformations and to avoid users manually determining the most
suitable one. In MTEFIM, multiple transformations are optimized simultaneously
as multiple tasks. Each transformation is assigned an evolutionary solver.
Three major components of MTEFIM are conducted via: 1) estimating the potential
relationship across transformations based on the degree of overlap across
individuals of different populations, 2) transferring individuals across
populations adaptively according to the inter-transformation relationship, and
3) selecting the final output seed set containing all the transformation's
knowledge. The effectiveness of MTEFIM is validated on both benchmarks and
real-world social networks. The experimental results show that MTEFIM can
efficiently utilize the potentially transferable knowledge across multiple
transformations to achieve highly competitive performance compared to several
popular IM-specific methods. The implementation of MTEFIM can be accessed at
https://github.com/xiaofangxd/MTEFIM.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE Computational Intelligence
Magazine for publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after
which this version may no longer be accessibl