MINIMIZING THE COMPLETE INFLUENCE TIME IN A SOCIAL NETWORK WITH STOCHASTIC COSTS FOR INFLUENCING NODES

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of targeting a set of individuals to trigger a cascade of influence in a social network such that the influence diffuses to all individuals with the minimum time, given that the cost of initially influencing each individual is with randomness and that the budget available is limited. We adopt the incremental chance model to characterize the diffusion of influence, and propose three stochastic programming models that correspond to three different decision criteria respectively. A modified greedy algorithm is presented to solve the proposed models, which can flexibly trade off between solution performance and computational complexity. Experiments are performed on random graphs, by which we show that the algorithm we present is effective.