Targeted Influence with Community and Gender-Aware Seeding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a community and gender-aware seeding algorithm for social networks that improves targeted information spread and fairness, especially for gender groups, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm leveraging community structure and gender potential to enhance targeted influence and fairness in information dissemination.

Findings

Achieves desired gender-based target ratios in spreading campaigns.

Outperforms state-of-the-art gender-aware seeding algorithms in spread efficiency.

Validated on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Abstract

When spreading information over social networks, seeding algorithms selecting users to start the dissemination play a crucial role. The majority of existing seeding algorithms focus solely on maximizing the total number of reached nodes, overlooking the issue of group fairness, in particular, gender imbalance. To tackle the challenge of maximizing information spread on certain target groups, e.g., females, we introduce the concept of the community and gender-aware potential of users. We first show that the network's community structure is closely related to the gender distribution. Then, we propose an algorithm that leverages the information about community structure and its gender potential to iteratively modify a seed set such that the information spread on the target group meets the target ratio. Finally, we validate the algorithm by performing experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that the proposed seeding algorithm achieves not only the target ratio but also the highest information spread, compared to the state-of-the-art gender-aware seeding algorithm.