13 research outputs found
Exact Computation of Influence Spread by Binary Decision Diagrams
Evaluating influence spread in social networks is a fundamental procedure to
estimate the word-of-mouth effect in viral marketing. There are enormous
studies about this topic; however, under the standard stochastic cascade
models, the exact computation of influence spread is known to be #P-hard. Thus,
the existing studies have used Monte-Carlo simulation-based approximations to
avoid exact computation.
We propose the first algorithm to compute influence spread exactly under the
independent cascade model. The algorithm first constructs binary decision
diagrams (BDDs) for all possible realizations of influence spread, then
computes influence spread by dynamic programming on the constructed BDDs. To
construct the BDDs efficiently, we designed a new frontier-based search-type
procedure. The constructed BDDs can also be used to solve other
influence-spread related problems, such as random sampling without rejection,
conditional influence spread evaluation, dynamic probability update, and
gradient computation for probability optimization problems.
We conducted computational experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm.
The algorithm successfully computed influence spread on real-world networks
with a hundred edges in a reasonable time, which is quite impossible by the
naive algorithm. We also conducted an experiment to evaluate the accuracy of
the Monte-Carlo simulation-based approximation by comparing exact influence
spread obtained by the proposed algorithm.Comment: WWW'1
Importance Sketching of Influence Dynamics in Billion-scale Networks
The blooming availability of traces for social, biological, and communication
networks opens up unprecedented opportunities in analyzing diffusion processes
in networks. However, the sheer sizes of the nowadays networks raise serious
challenges in computational efficiency and scalability.
In this paper, we propose a new hyper-graph sketching framework for inflence
dynamics in networks. The central of our sketching framework, called SKIS, is
an efficient importance sampling algorithm that returns only non-singular
reverse cascades in the network. Comparing to previously developed sketches
like RIS and SKIM, our sketch significantly enhances estimation quality while
substantially reducing processing time and memory-footprint. Further, we
present general strategies of using SKIS to enhance existing algorithms for
influence estimation and influence maximization which are motivated by
practical applications like viral marketing. Using SKIS, we design high-quality
influence oracle for seed sets with average estimation error up to 10x times
smaller than those using RIS and 6x times smaller than SKIM. In addition, our
influence maximization using SKIS substantially improves the quality of
solutions for greedy algorithms. It achieves up to 10x times speed-up and 4x
memory reduction for the fastest RIS-based DSSA algorithm, while maintaining
the same theoretical guarantees.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in ICDM 2017 as a regular pape
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
Time-Dependent Influence Measurement in Citation Networks
In every scientific discipline, researchers face two common dilemmas: where to find bleeding-edge papers and where to publish their own articles. We propose to answer these questions by looking at the influence between communities, e.g. conferences or journals. The influential conferences are those which papers are heavily cited by other conferences, i.e. they are visible, significant and inspiring. For the task of finding such influential places-to-publish, we introduce a Running Influence model that aims to discover pairwise influence between communities and evaluate the overall influence of each considered community. We have taken into consideration time aspects such as intensity of papers citations over time and difference of conferences starting years. The community influence analysis is tested on real-world data of Computer Science conferences
Temporal cascade model for analyzing spread in evolving networks
Current approaches for modeling propagation in networks (e.g., of diseases, computer viruses, rumors) cannot adequately capture temporal properties such as order/duration of evolving connections or dynamic likelihoods of propagation along connections. Temporal models on evolving networks are crucial in applications that need to analyze dynamic spread. For example, a disease spreading virus has varying transmissibility based on interactions between individuals occurring with different frequency, proximity, and venue population density. Similarly, propagation of information having a limited active period, such as rumors, depends on the temporal dynamics of social interactions. To capture such behaviors, we first develop the Temporal Independent Cascade (T-IC) model with a spread function that efficiently utilizes a hypergraph-based sampling strategy and dynamic propagation probabilities. We prove this function to be submodular, with guarantees of approximation quality. This enables scalable analysis on highly granular temporal networks where other models struggle, such as when the spread across connections exhibits arbitrary temporally evolving patterns. We then introduce the notion of âreverse spreadâ using the proposed T-IC processes, and develop novel solutions to identify both sentinel/detector nodes and highly susceptible nodes. Extensive analysis on real-world datasets shows that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the alternatives in modeling both if and how spread occurs, by considering evolving network topology alongside granular contact/interaction information. Our approach has numerous applications, such as virus/rumor/influence tracking. Utilizing T-IC, we explore vital challenges of monitoring the impact of various intervention strategies over real spatio-temporal contact networks where we show our approach to be highly effective