Efficient Influence Maximization in Weighted Independent Cascade Model

Abstract: Influence maximization(IM) problem is to find a seed set in a social network which achieves the maximal influence spread. This problem plays an important role in viral marketing. Numerous models have been proposed to solve this problem. However, none of them considers the attributes of nodes. Paying all attention to the structure of network causes some trouble applying these models to real-word applications. Motivated by this, we present weighted independent cascade (WIC) model, a novel cascade model which extends the applicability of independent cascade(IC) model by attaching attributes to the nodes. The IM problem in WIC model is to maximize the value of nodes which are influenced. This problem is NP-hard. To solve this problem, we present a basic greedy algorithm and Weight Reset(WR) algorithm. Moreover, we propose Bounded Weight Reset(BWR) algorithm to make further effort to improve the efficiency by bounding the diffusion node influence. We prove that BWR is a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme(FPTAS). Experimentally, we show that with additional node attribute, the solution achieved by WIC model outperforms that of IC model in nearly 90%. The experimental results show that BWR can achieve excellent approximation and faster than greedy algorithm more than three orders of magnitude with little sacrifice of accuracy. Especially, BWR can handle large networks with millions of nodes in several tens of seconds while keeping rather high accuracy. Such result demonstrates that BWR can solve IM problem effectively and efficiently.