959 research outputs found
Adaptive Submodular Influence Maximization with Myopic Feedback
This paper examines the problem of adaptive influence maximization in social
networks. As adaptive decision making is a time-critical task, a realistic
feedback model has been considered, called myopic. In this direction, we
propose the myopic adaptive greedy policy that is guaranteed to provide a (1 -
1/e)-approximation of the optimal policy under a variant of the independent
cascade diffusion model. This strategy maximizes an alternative utility
function that has been proven to be adaptive monotone and adaptive submodular.
The proposed utility function considers the cumulative number of active nodes
through the time, instead of the total number of the active nodes at the end of
the diffusion. Our empirical analysis on real-world social networks reveals the
benefits of the proposed myopic strategy, validating our theoretical results.Comment: Accepted by IEEE/ACM International Conference Advances in Social
Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 201
From Competition to Complementarity: Comparative Influence Diffusion and Maximization
Influence maximization is a well-studied problem that asks for a small set of
influential users from a social network, such that by targeting them as early
adopters, the expected total adoption through influence cascades over the
network is maximized. However, almost all prior work focuses on cascades of a
single propagating entity or purely-competitive entities. In this work, we
propose the Comparative Independent Cascade (Com-IC) model that covers the full
spectrum of entity interactions from competition to complementarity. In Com-IC,
users' adoption decisions depend not only on edge-level information
propagation, but also on a node-level automaton whose behavior is governed by a
set of model parameters, enabling our model to capture not only competition,
but also complementarity, to any possible degree. We study two natural
optimization problems, Self Influence Maximization and Complementary Influence
Maximization, in a novel setting with complementary entities. Both problems are
NP-hard, and we devise efficient and effective approximation algorithms via
non-trivial techniques based on reverse-reachable sets and a novel "sandwich
approximation". The applicability of both techniques extends beyond our model
and problems. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithms consistently
outperform intuitive baselines in four real-world social networks, often by a
significant margin. In addition, we learn model parameters from real user
action logs.Comment: An abridged of this work is to appear in the Proceedings of VLDB
Endowment (PVDLB), Vol 9, No 2. Also, the paper will be presented in the VLDB
2016 conference in New Delhi, India. This update contains new theoretical and
experimental results, and the paper is now in single-column format (44 pages
Locally Adaptive Optimization: Adaptive Seeding for Monotone Submodular Functions
The Adaptive Seeding problem is an algorithmic challenge motivated by
influence maximization in social networks: One seeks to select among certain
accessible nodes in a network, and then select, adaptively, among neighbors of
those nodes as they become accessible in order to maximize a global objective
function. More generally, adaptive seeding is a stochastic optimization
framework where the choices in the first stage affect the realizations in the
second stage, over which we aim to optimize.
Our main result is a -approximation for the adaptive seeding
problem for any monotone submodular function. While adaptive policies are often
approximated via non-adaptive policies, our algorithm is based on a novel
method we call \emph{locally-adaptive} policies. These policies combine a
non-adaptive global structure, with local adaptive optimizations. This method
enables the -approximation for general monotone submodular functions
and circumvents some of the impossibilities associated with non-adaptive
policies.
We also introduce a fundamental problem in submodular optimization that may
be of independent interest: given a ground set of elements where every element
appears with some small probability, find a set of expected size at most
that has the highest expected value over the realization of the elements. We
show a surprising result: there are classes of monotone submodular functions
(including coverage) that can be approximated almost optimally as the
probability vanishes. For general monotone submodular functions we show via a
reduction from \textsc{Planted-Clique} that approximations for this problem are
not likely to be obtainable. This optimization problem is an important tool for
adaptive seeding via non-adaptive policies, and its hardness motivates the
introduction of \emph{locally-adaptive} policies we use in the main result
Beyond Worst-Case (In)approximability of Nonsubmodular Influence Maximization
We consider the problem of maximizing the spread of influence in a social
network by choosing a fixed number of initial seeds, formally referred to as
the influence maximization problem. It admits a -factor approximation
algorithm if the influence function is submodular. Otherwise, in the worst
case, the problem is NP-hard to approximate to within a factor of
. This paper studies whether this worst-case hardness result
can be circumvented by making assumptions about either the underlying network
topology or the cascade model. All of our assumptions are motivated by many
real life social network cascades.
First, we present strong inapproximability results for a very restricted
class of networks called the (stochastic) hierarchical blockmodel, a special
case of the well-studied (stochastic) blockmodel in which relationships between
blocks admit a tree structure. We also provide a dynamic-program based
polynomial time algorithm which optimally computes a directed variant of the
influence maximization problem on hierarchical blockmodel networks. Our
algorithm indicates that the inapproximability result is due to the
bidirectionality of influence between agent-blocks.
Second, we present strong inapproximability results for a class of influence
functions that are "almost" submodular, called 2-quasi-submodular. Our
inapproximability results hold even for any 2-quasi-submodular fixed in
advance. This result also indicates that the "threshold" between submodularity
and nonsubmodularity is sharp, regarding the approximability of influence
maximization.Comment: 53 pages, 20 figures; Conference short version - WINE 2017: The 13th
Conference on Web and Internet Economics; Journal full version - ACM:
Transactions on Computation Theory, 201
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