Learning Peer Influence Probabilities with Linear Contextual Bandits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new online learning algorithm within a linear contextual bandit framework to accurately estimate peer influence probabilities in networked environments, balancing exploration and estimation error.

Contribution

It characterizes the fundamental trade-off between regret minimization and estimation error and proposes an uncertainty-guided exploration algorithm that can tune this trade-off.

Findings

The proposed method outperforms static and non-trade-off-aware bandit approaches.

It effectively balances exploration and estimation accuracy.

Experimental results demonstrate improved influence probability estimation.

Abstract

In networked environments, users frequently share recommendations about content, products, services, and courses of action with others. The extent to which such recommendations are successful and adopted is highly contextual, dependent on the characteristics of the sender, recipient, their relationship, the recommended item, and the medium, which makes peer influence probabilities highly heterogeneous. Accurate estimation of these probabilities is key to understanding information diffusion processes and to improving the effectiveness of viral marketing strategies. However, learning these probabilities from data is challenging; static data may capture correlations between peer recommendations and peer actions but fails to reveal influence relationships. Online learning algorithms can learn these probabilities from interventions but either waste resources by learning from random exploration or optimize for rewards, thus favoring exploration of the space with higher influence probabilities. In this work, we study learning peer influence probabilities under a contextual linear bandit framework. We show that a fundamental trade-off can arise between regret minimization and estimation error, characterize all achievable rate pairs, and propose an uncertainty-guided exploration algorithm that, by tuning a parameter, attains any pair within this trade-off. Our experiments on semi-synthetic network datasets show the advantages of our method over static methods and contextual bandits that ignore this trade-off.