# Diversifying Seeds and Audience in Social Influence Maximization

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new influence maximization framework that balances influence spread with audience and seed diversity, using economic utility functions and approximation algorithms, outperforming existing heuristics.

## Contribution

It incorporates audience and seed diversity into influence maximization using economic utility functions and develops approximation algorithms with theoretical guarantees.

## Key findings

- Framework outperforms heuristics in utility maximization
- Effective algorithms for audience and seed diversification
- Validated utility functions with desirable properties

## Abstract

Influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied for better viral marketing. However, previous works put less emphasis on how balancedly the audience are affected across different communities and how diversely the seed nodes are selected. In this paper, we incorporate audience diversity and seed diversity into the IM task. From the model perspective, in order to characterize both influence spread and diversity in our objective function, we adopt three commonly used utilities in economics (i.e., Perfect Substitutes, Perfect Complements and Cobb-Douglas). We validate our choices of these three functions by showing their nice properties. From the algorithmic perspective, we present various approximation strategies to maximize the utilities. In audience diversification, we propose a solution-dependent approximation algorithm to circumvent the hardness results. In seed diversification, we prove a ($1/e-\epsilon$) approximation ratio based on non-monotonic submodular maximization. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms other natural heuristics both in utility maximization and result diversification.