AN APPROACH TO APPROXIMATE DIFFUSION PROCESSES IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Social network analysis is concerned with the analysis of influence of an individual within a social network and how the influence diffuses through the network. It has been shown useful in business analytics. In this paper, we extend a nonlinear dynamical system that accurately models virus propagation in epidemiology to model information diffusion in social networks. Our approach can numerically calculate each node’s probability to get activated given the initial active set. It provides an alternative way of estimating the number of nodes reached by the initial target set in the diffusion process. We validate our approach by comparing its predicting performance with diffusion simulations. Using the number of nodes reached in the diffusion process as an influence measure, our results show that the proposed method can provide a way of identifying nontrivial nodes as influencer

A shapley value-based approach to discover influential nodes in social networks

Our study concerns an important current problem, that of diffusion of information in social networks. This problem has received significant attention from the Internet research community in the recent times, driven by many potential applications such as viral marketing and sales promotions. In this paper, we focus on the target set selection problem, which involves discovering a small subset of influential players in a given social network, to perform a certain task of information diffusion. The target set selection problem manifests in two forms: 1) top-k nodes problem and 2) λ-coverage problem. In the top-k nodes problem, we are required to find a set of k key nodes that would maximize the number of nodes being influenced in the network. The λ-coverage problem is concerned with finding a set of key nodes having minimal size that can influence a given percentage λ of the nodes in the entire network. We propose a new way of solving these problems using the concept of Shapley value which is a well known solution concept in cooperative game theory. Our approach leads to algorithms which we call the ShaPley value-based Influential Nodes (SPINs) algorithms for solving the top-k nodes problem and the λ-coverage problem. We compare the performance of the proposed SPIN algorithms with well known algorithms in the literature. Through extensive experimentation on four synthetically generated random graphs and six-real-world data sets (Celegans, Jazz, NIPS coauthorship data set, Netscience data set, High-Energy Physics data set, and Political Books data set), we show that the proposed SPIN approach is more powerful and computationally efficient

Identification of Influential Social Networkers

Online social networking is deeply interleaved in today\u27s lifestyle. People come together and build communities to share thoughts, offer suggestions, exchange information, ideas, and opinions. Moreover, social networks often serve as platforms for information dissemination and product placement or promotion through viral marketing. The success rate in this type of marketing could be increased by targeting specific individuals, called \u27influential users\u27, having the largest possible reach within an online community. In this paper, we present a method aiming at identifying the influential users within an online social networking application. We introduce ProfileRank, a metric that uses popularity and activity characteristics of each user to rank them in terms of their influence. We then assess this algorithm\u27s added value in identifying influential users compared to other commonly used social network analysis metrics, such as the betweenness centrality and the well-known PageRank, by performing an experimental evaluation on a synthetic and a real-life dataset. We also integrate all three metrics in a unified metric and measure its performance

A Complex Neighborhood Based Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a new variant of the PSO algorithm named Complex Neighborhood Particle Swarm Optimizer (CNPSO) for solving global optimization problems. In the CNPSO, the neighborhood of the particles is organized through a complex network which is modified during the search process. This evolution of the topology seeks to improve the influence of the most successful particles and it is fine tuned for maintaining the scale-free characteristics of the network while the optimization is being performed. The use of a scale-free topology instead of the usual regular or global neighborhoods is intended to bring to the search procedure a better capability of exploring promising regions without a premature convergence, which would result in the procedure being easily trapped in a local optimum. The performance of the CNPSO is compared with the standard PSO on some wellknown and high-dimensional benchmark functions, ranging from multimodal to plateau-like problems. 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