A model for profit maximization in LBSNs

Abstract

Profit Maximization is the problem of finding an optimal strategy to maximize the expected total profit earned by the end of an influence diffusion process under a given propagation model. In the previous works the strategy of influencing the most profitable (influential) users in a social network in order to start the viral marketing campaign has been proposed. These initial users are called the Seed Set. In this work, we introduce a new problem namely Location-Based Profit Maximization (LBPM) and provide a model to solve it. LBPM is the problem of finding the most profitable Seed Set in a Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) in such a way that the expected profit for the owners of a specific venue would be maximized under a certain propagation model considering a limited budget. The proposed model encompasses two main steps. In the first step, we provide Profit Calculation Algorithm to estimate the profitability of each user for a particular venue, considering social aspect, spatial aspect, and users' opinion aspect. Then, in the second step we utilize Linear Threshold (LT) diffusion model under our proposed P-Greedy algorithm to find the final Seed Set.