A Social Influence Model Based On Circuit Theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel social influence model based on electrical circuit theory that improves efficiency and interpretability of influence propagation in social networks, aiding influence maximization tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a new influence model leveraging circuit theory, enhancing computational efficiency and interpretability in social influence analysis.

Findings

Model significantly outperforms existing methods on real data.

Reduces computational burden in influence maximization.

Provides a coherent interpretation of influence propagation.

Abstract

Understanding the behaviors of information propagation is essential for the effective exploitation of social influence in social networks. However, few existing influence models are tractable and efficient for describing the information propagation process, especially when dealing with the difficulty of incorporating the effects of combined influences from multiple nodes. To this end, in this paper, we provide a social influence model that alleviates this obstacle based on electrical circuit theory. This model vastly improves the efficiency of measuring the influence strength between any pair of nodes, and can be used to interpret the real-world influence propagation process in a coherent way. In addition, this circuit theory model provides a natural solution to the social influence maximization problem. When applied to realworld data, the circuit theory model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can greatly alleviate the computation burden of the influence maximization problem.