Two-Phase Influence Maximization in Social Networks with Seed Nodes and Referral Incentives
Paper in proceeding, 2017

The problem of maximizing the spread of influence with a limited budget is central to social networks research. Most solution approaches available in the existing literature devote the entire budget towards triggering diffusion at seed nodes. This paper investigates the effect of splitting the budget across two different, sequential phases. In phase 1, we adopt the classical approach of initiating diffusion at a selected seed-set. In phase 2, we use the remaining budget to offer referral incentives. We formulate this problem and explore suitable ways to split the budget between the two phases, with detailed experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. The principal findings from our study are: (a) when the budget is low, it is prudent to use the entire budget for phase 1; (b) when the budget is moderate to high, it is preferable to use much of the budget for phase 1, while allocating the remaining budget to phase 2; (c) in the presence of moderate to strict temporal constraints, phase 2 is not warranted; (d) if the temporal constraints are low or absent, phase 2 yields a decisive improvement in influence spread.

Author

Sneha Mondal

Indian Institute of Science

Swapnil Vilas Dhamal

Indian Institute of Science

Y. Narahari

Indian Institute of Science

ICWSM 2017 - Proceedings of the 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

2162-3449 (ISSN) 2334-0770 (eISSN)

Vol. 11 1 620-623
978-157735788-9 (ISBN)

11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017
Montreal, Canada,

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computational Mathematics

Other Engineering and Technologies not elsewhere specified

Computer Science

More information

Latest update

4/14/2022