Influence maximization is a well-known problem in the social network analysis literature which is to find a small subset of seed nodes to maximize the diffusion or spread of information. The main application of this problem in the real-world is in viral marketing. However, the classic influence maximization is disabled to model the real-world viral marketing problem, since the effect of the marketing message content and nodes’ opinions have not been considered. In this paper, a modified version of influence maximization which is named as “opinion-aware influence maximization” (OAIM) problem is proposed to make the model more realistic. In this problem, the main objective is to maximize the spread of a desired opinion, by optimizing the message content, rather than the number of infected nodes, which leads to selection of the best set of seed nodes. A nonlinear bi-objective mathematical programming model is developed to model the considered problem. Some transformation techniques are applied to convert the proposed model to a linear single-objective mathematical programming model. The exact solution of the model in small datasets can be obtained by CPLEX algorithm. For the medium and large-scale datasets, a new genetic algorithm is proposed to cope with the size of the problem. Experimental results on some of the well-known datasets show the efficiency and applicability of the proposed OAIM model. In addition, the proposed genetic algorithm overcomes state-of-the-art algorithms.
Influence maximization is the problem of trying to maximize the number of influenced nodes by selecting optimal seed nodes, given that influencing these nodes is costly. Due to the probabilistic nature of the problem, existing approaches deal with the concept of the expected number of nodes. In the current research, a scenario-based robust optimization approach is taken to finding the most influential nodes. The proposed robust optimization model maximizes the number of infected nodes in the last step of diffusion while minimizing the number of seed nodes. Nodes, however, are treated as heterogeneous with regard to their propensity to pass messages along; or as having varying activation thresholds. Experiments are performed on a real text-messaging social network. The model developed here significantly outperforms some of the well-known existing heuristic approaches which are proposed in previous works.
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