Budgeted Influence and Earned Benefit Maximization with Tags in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel influence maximization framework in social networks that incorporates tag-specific influence probabilities and costs, addressing real-world context-dependent influence scenarios.

Contribution

It formulates the TBIM and TEBM problems, considering tag-specific influence and costs, and proposes three effective methodologies for influence gain computation.

Findings

Proposed three methodologies for influence gain computation.

Analyzed time and space complexity of the methodologies.

Addressed influence maximization with tag-specific influence probabilities.

Abstract

Given a social network, where each user is associated with a selection cost, the problem of \textsc{Budgeted Influence Maximization} (\emph{BIM Problem} in short) asks to choose a subset of them (known as seed users) within an allocated budget whose initial activation leads to the maximum number of influenced nodes. Existing Studies on this problem do not consider the tag-specific influence probability. However, in reality, influence probability between two users always depends upon the context (e.g., sports, politics, etc.). To address this issue, in this paper we introduce the \textsc{Tag\mbox{-}Based Budgeted Influence Maximization problem} (\emph{TBIM Problem} in short), where along with the other inputs, a tag set (each of them is also associated with a selection cost) is given, each edge of the network has the tag specific influence probability, and here the goal is to select influential users as well as influential tags within the allocated budget to maximize the influence. Considering the fact that real-world campaigns targeted in nature, we also study the \textsc{Earned Benefit Maximization} Problem in tag specific influence probability setting, which formally we call the \textsc{Tag\mbox{-}Based Earned Benefit Maximization problem} (\emph{TEBM Problem} in short). For this problem along with the inputs of the TBIM Problem, we are given a subset of the nodes as target users, and each one of them is associated with a benefit value that can be earned by influencing them. Considering the fact that different tag has different popularity across the communities of the same network, we propose three methodologies that work based on \emph{effective marginal influence gain computation}. The proposed methodologies have been analyzed for their time and space requirements.