Maximizing Welfare in Social Networks under a Utility Driven Influence Diffusion Model

Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large cascade of adoptions by others. Existing works have three key limitations. (1) They do not account for economic considerations of a user in buying/adopting items. (2) Most studies on multiple items focus on competition, with complementary items receiving limited attention. (3) For the network owner, maximizing social welfare is important to ensure customer loyalty, which is not addressed in prior work in the IM literature. In this paper, we address all three limitations and propose a novel model called UIC that combines utility-driven item adoption with influence propagation over networks. Focusing on the mutually complementary setting, we formulate the problem of social welfare maximization in this novel setting. We show that while the objective function is neither submodular nor supermodular, surprisingly a simple greedy allocation algorithm achieves a factor of $(1-1/e-\epsilon)$ of the optimum expected social welfare. We develop \textsf{bundleGRD}, a scalable version of this approximation algorithm, and demonstrate, with comprehensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, that it significantly outperforms all baselines.Comment: 33 page

Mining High Utility Itemsets with Regular Occurrence

High utility itemset mining (HUIM) plays an important role in the data mining community and in a wide range of applications. For example, in retail business it is used for finding sets of sold products that give high profit, low cost, etc. These itemsets can help improve marketing strategies, make promotions/ advertisements, etc. However, since HUIM only considers utility values of items/itemsets, it may not be sufficient to observe product-buying behavior of customers such as information related to "regular purchases of sets of products having a high profit margin". To address this issue, the occurrence behavior of itemsets (in the term of regularity) simultaneously with their utility values was investigated. Then, the problem of mining high utility itemsets with regular occurrence (MHUIR) to find sets of co-occurrence items with high utility values and regular occurrence in a database was considered. An efficient single-pass algorithm, called MHUIRA, was introduced. A new modified utility-list structure, called NUL, was designed to efficiently maintain utility values and occurrence information and to increase the efficiency of computing the utility of itemsets. Experimental studies on real and synthetic datasets and complexity analyses are provided to show the efficiency of MHUIRA combined with NUL in terms of time and space usage for mining interesting itemsets based on regularity and utility constraints