Efficient Algorithms towards Network Intervention.

Abstract

Research suggests that social relationships have substantial impacts on individuals' health outcomes. Network intervention, through careful planning, can assist a network of users to build healthy relationships. However, most previous work is not designed to assist such planning by carefully examining and improving multiple network characteristics. In this paper, we propose and evaluate algorithms that facilitate network intervention planning through simultaneous optimization of network degree, closeness, betweenness, and local clustering coefficient, under scenarios involving Network Intervention with Limited Degradation - for Single target (NILD-S) and Network Intervention with Limited Degradation - for Multiple targets (NILD-M). We prove that NILD-S and NILD-M are NP-hard and cannot be approximated within any ratio in polynomial time unless P=NP. We propose the Candidate Re-selection with Preserved Dependency (CRPD) algorithm for NILD-S, and the Objective-aware Intervention edge Selection and Adjustment (OISA) algorithm for NILD-M. Various pruning strategies are designed to boost the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Extensive experiments on various real social networks collected from public schools and Web and an empirical study are conducted to show that CRPD and OISA outperform the baselines in both efficiency and effectiveness.