Big Networks: Analysis and Optimal Control

The study of networks has seen a tremendous breed of researches due to the explosive spectrum of practical problems that involve networks as the access point. Those problems widely range from detecting functionally correlated proteins in biology to finding people to give discounts and gain maximum popularity of a product in economics. Thus, understanding and further being able to manipulate/control the development and evolution of the networks become critical tasks for network scientists. Despite the vast research effort putting towards these studies, the present state-of-the-arts largely either lack of high quality solutions or require excessive amount of time in real-world `Big Data\u27 requirement. This research aims at affirmatively boosting the modern algorithmic efficiency to approach practical requirements. That is developing a ground-breaking class of algorithms that provide simultaneously both provably good solution qualities and low time and space complexities. Specifically, I target the important yet challenging problems in the three main areas: Information Diffusion: Analyzing and maximizing the influence in networks and extending results for different variations of the problems. Community Detection: Finding communities from multiple sources of information. Security and Privacy: Assessing organization vulnerability under targeted-cyber attacks via social networks

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

IDENTIFYING MAVENS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

This thesis studies social influence from the perspective of users\u27 characteristics. The importance of users\u27 characteristics in word-of-mouth applications has been emphasized in economics and marketing fields. We model a category of users called mavens where their unique characteristics nominate them to be the preferable seeds in viral marketing applications. In addition, we develop some methods to learn their characteristics based on a real dataset. We also illustrate the ways to maximize information flow through mavens in social networks. Our experiments show that our model can successfully detect mavens as well as fulfill significant roles in maximizing the information flow in a social network where mavens considerably outperform general influential users for influence maximization. The results verify the compatibility of our model with real marketing applications

Efektivní algoritmy pro problémy se sociálním vlivem u velkých sítí

In recent years, the dizzying explosion of data and information results from social networks with millions to billions of users, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Users can use online social networks (OSNs) to quickly trade information, communicate with other users, and keep their information up-to-date. The challenge of spreading information on social networks that arises in practice requires effective information management solutions, such as disseminating useful information, maximizing the influence of information transmission, and preventing disinformation, rumors, and viruses from being disseminated. Motivated by the above issues, we investigate the problem of information diffusion on OSNs. We study this problem based on two models, Independent Cascade (IC) and Linear Threshold (LT), and classical Influence Maximization (IM) in online social networks. In addition, we investigate various aspects of IM problems, such as budget variations, topics of interest, multiple competitors, and others. Moreover, we also investigate and apply the theory of combinatorial optimization problems to solve one of the current concerns in social networks, maximizing the influence on the groups and topics in social networks. In general, the main goals of the Ph.D thesis proposal are as follows. 1. We investigate the Multi-Threshold problem for IM, which is a variant of the IM problem with threshold constraints. We propose an efficient algorithm that IM for multiple thresholds in the social network. In particular, we develop a novel algorithmic framework that can use the solution to a smaller threshold to find that of larger ones. 2. We study the Group Influence Maximization problem and introduce an efficient group influence maximization algorithm with more advantages than each node’s influence in networks, using a novel sampling technique to estimate the epsilon group function. We also devised an approximation algorithm to estimate multiple candidate solutions with theoretical guarantee. 3. We investigate an approach for Influence Maximization problem with k-topic under constraints in social network. More specifically, we also study a streaming algorithm that combines an optimization algorithm to improve the approximation algorithm and theoretical guarantee in terms of solution quality and running time.V posledních letech je závratná exploze dat a informací výsledkem sociálních sítí s miliony až miliardami uživatelů, jako jsou Facebook, YouTube, Twitter a LinkedIn. Uživatelé mohou využívat online sociální sítě (OSNs) k rychlému obchodování s informacemi, komunikaci s ostatními uživateli a udržování jejich informací v aktuálním stavu. Výzva šíření informací na sociálních sítích, která se v praxi objevuje, vyžaduje efektivní řešení správy informací, jako je šíření užitečných informací, maximalizace vlivu přenosu informací a zabránění šíření dezinformací, fám a virů. Motivováni výše uvedenými problémy zkoumáme problém šíření informací na OSN. Tento problém studujeme na základě dvou modelů, Independent Cascade (IC) a Linear Threshold (LT) a klasické Influence Maximization (IM) v online sociálních sítích. Kromě toho zkoumáme různé aspekty problémů s rychlým zasíláním zpráv, jako jsou změny rozpočtu, témata zájmu, více konkurentů a další. Kromě toho také zkoumáme a aplikujeme teorii kombinatorických optimalizačních problémů k vyřešení jednoho ze současných problémů v sociálních sítích, maximalizujeme vliv na skupiny a témata v sociálních sítích. Obecně lze říci, že hlavní cíle Ph.D. návrh diplomové práce je následující. 1. Zkoumáme problém Multi-Threshold pro IM, což je varianta problému IM s prahovými omezeními. Navrhujeme účinný algoritmus, který IM pro více prahů v sociální síti. Zejména vyvíjíme nový algoritmický rámec, který může použít řešení pro menší práh k nalezení prahu většího. 2. Studujeme problém maximalizace vlivu skupiny a zavádíme účinný algoritmus maxima- lizace vlivu skupiny s více výhodami, než je vliv každého uzlu v sítích, pomocí nové vzorkovací techniky k odhadu funkce skupiny epsilon. Navrhujeme také aproximační algoritmus pro odhad více kandidátních řešení s teoretickou zárukou. 3. Zkoumáme přístup pro maximalizaci vlivu s k-téma pod omezeními v rozsáhlé síti. Konkrétněji budeme studovat novou metriku, která kombinuje optimalizační algoritmus pro zlepšení aproximačního algoritmu z hlediska kvality řešení a doby běhu na základě kliky a komunity v komplexních sítích.460 - Katedra informatikyvyhově