Polarity related influence maximization in signed social networks

PLoS One. 2014 Jul 25;9(7):e102199. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102199. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Influence maximization in social networks has been widely studied motivated by applications like spread of ideas or innovations in a network and viral marketing of products. Current studies focus almost exclusively on unsigned social networks containing only positive relationships (e.g. friend or trust) between users. Influence maximization in signed social networks containing both positive relationships and negative relationships (e.g. foe or distrust) between users is still a challenging problem that has not been studied. Thus, in this paper, we propose the polarity-related influence maximization (PRIM) problem which aims to find the seed node set with maximum positive influence or maximum negative influence in signed social networks. To address the PRIM problem, we first extend the standard Independent Cascade (IC) model to the signed social networks and propose a Polarity-related Independent Cascade (named IC-P) diffusion model. We prove that the influence function of the PRIM problem under the IC-P model is monotonic and submodular Thus, a greedy algorithm can be used to achieve an approximation ratio of 1-1/e for solving the PRIM problem in signed social networks. Experimental results on two signed social network datasets, Epinions and Slashdot, validate that our approximation algorithm for solving the PRIM problem outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Friends / psychology
  • Humans
  • Leadership
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Social Support*
  • Trust / psychology

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61173074), the ARO Award Number W911NF-08-1-0301 and the ARO Award Number W911NF-13-1-0416. The URL of the funder's website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sycara/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.