40,098 research outputs found
Towards Profit Maximization for Online Social Network Providers
Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information
and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the
sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct
viral marketing campaigns. The OSN provider generates revenue from the
commission paid by the advertiser which is determined by the spread of its
product information. Meanwhile, to propagate influence, the activities
performed by users such as viewing video ads normally induce diffusion cost to
the OSN provider. In this paper, we aim to find a seed set to optimize a new
profit metric that combines the benefit of influence spread with the cost of
influence propagation for the OSN provider. Under many diffusion models, our
profit metric is the difference between two submodular functions which is
challenging to optimize as it is neither submodular nor monotone. We design a
general two-phase framework to select seeds for profit maximization and develop
several bounds to measure the quality of the seed set constructed. Experimental
results with real OSN datasets show that our approach can achieve high
approximation guarantees and significantly outperform the baseline algorithms,
including state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms.Comment: INFOCOM 2018 (Full version), 12 page
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
- …