skip to main content
10.1145/3459637.3481928acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescikmConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Influence Maximization in Multi-Relational Social Networks

Published: 30 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Influence maximization (IM) is a classic problem, which aims to find a set of k users (called seed set) in a social network such that the expected number of users influenced by the seed users is maximized. Existing IM algorithms mainly focus on one-by-one influence diffusion among users with friendships. However, in addition to 1-to-1 friendships, 1-to-N group relations usually exist in real social platforms, which are seldom fully exploited by conventional methods.
In this paper, with the real-world datasets in WeChat, the largest online social platform in China, we first study the IM problem in multi-relational social networks consisting of friendships and group relations, and propose a novel Generate&Extend framework to find influential seed users for product promotion. Specifically, to achieve a trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency, we present a truncated meta-seed generator to select a small number of users, which are influential with consideration of both friendships and group relations. More importantly, a structural seed extender is put forward to extend the meta-seed set, so as to encode the differentiated propagation structures between friendships and group relations. Extensive online/offline experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that Generate&Extend significantly outperforms the state of the arts. Our Generate&Extend has been deployed at WeChat for mini-program promoting, and severing more than 200 million users.

References

[1]
Eva Anduiza, Camilo Cristancho, and José M Sabucedo. 2014. Mobilization through online social networks: the political protest of the indignados in Spain. Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 17, 6 (2014), 750--764.
[2]
Nicolas M Anspach. 2017. The new personal influence: How our Facebook friends influence the news we read. Political Communication, Vol. 34, 4 (2017), 590--606.
[3]
Akhil Arora, Sainyam Galhotra, and Sayan Ranu. 2017. Debunking the myths of influence maximization: An in-depth benchmarking study. In Proceedings of SIGMOD. 651--666.
[4]
Lobna Azaza, Sergey Kirgizov, Marinette Savonnet, Eric Leclercq, and Rim Faiz. 2015. Influence assessment in twitter multi-relational network. In Proceedings of SITIS. 436--443.
[5]
Eytan Bakshy, Jake M Hofman, Winter A Mason, and Duncan J Watts. 2011. Everyone's an influencer: quantifying influence on twitter. In Proceedings of WSDM. 65--74.
[6]
Suman Banerjee, Mamata Jenamani, and Dilip Kumar Pratihar. 2020. A survey on influence maximization in a social network. Knowledge and Information Systems (2020), 1--39.
[7]
Christian Borgs, Michael Brautbar, Jennifer Chayes, and Brendan Lucier. 2014. Maximizing social influence in nearly optimal time. In Proceedings of SIAM. 946--957.
[8]
Salvatore A Catanese, Pasquale De Meo, Emilio Ferrara, Giacomo Fiumara, and Alessandro Provetti. 2011. Crawling facebook for social network analysis purposes. In Proceedings of WIMS. 1--8.
[9]
Wei Chen, Wei Lu, and Ning Zhang. 2012. Time-Critical Influence Maximization in Social Networks with Time-Delayed Diffusion Process. In Proceedings of AAAI.
[10]
Wei Chen, Chi Wang, and Yajun Wang. 2010. Scalable influence maximization for prevalent viral marketing in large-scale social networks. In Proceedings of KDD. 1029--1038.
[11]
Wei Chen, Yajun Wang, and Siyu Yang. 2009. Efficient influence maximization in social networks. In Proceedings of KDD. 199--208.
[12]
Nan Du, Le Song, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, and Hongyuan Zha. 2013. Scalable influence estimation in continuous-time diffusion networks. In Proceedings of NeurIPS. 3147--3155.
[13]
Jacob Goldenberg, Barak Libai, and Eitan Muller. 2001. Talk of the network: A complex systems look at the underlying process of word-of-mouth. Marketing letters, Vol. 12, 3 (2001), 211--223.
[14]
Amit Goyal, Wei Lu, and Laks VS Lakshmanan. 2011. Celf optimizing the greedy algorithm for influence maximization in social networks. In Proceedings of WWW. 47--48.
[15]
Mark Granovetter. 1978. Threshold models of collective behavior. American journal of sociology, Vol. 83, 6 (1978), 1420--1443.
[16]
Adrien Guille, Hakim Hacid, Cecile Favre, and Djamel A Zighed. 2013. Information diffusion in online social networks: A survey. ACM Sigmod Record, Vol. 42, 2 (2013), 17--28.
[17]
Will Hamilton, Zhitao Ying, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Inductive representation learning on large graphs. In Proceedings of NeurIPS. 1024--1034.
[18]
David Kempe, Jon Kleinberg, and Éva Tardos. 2003. Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. In Proceedings of KDD. 137--146.
[19]
Moein Khajehnejad, Ahmad Asgharian Rezaei, Mahmoudreza Babaei, Jessica Hoffmann, Mahdi Jalili, and Adrian Weller. 2020. Adversarial Graph Embeddings for Fair Influence Maximization over Social Networks. In Proceedings of IJCAI. 4306--4312.
[20]
Samir Khuller, Anna Moss, and Joseph Seffi Naor. 1999. The budgeted maximum coverage problem. Information processing letters, Vol. 70, 1 (1999), 39--45.
[21]
Guoliang Li, Shuo Chen, Jianhua Feng, Kian-lee Tan, and Wen-syan Li. 2014. Efficient location-aware influence maximization. In Proceedings of SIGMOD. 87--98.
[22]
Yuchen Li, Ju Fan, Yanhao Wang, and Kian-Lee Tan. 2018. Influence maximization on social graphs: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 30, 10 (2018), 1852--1872.
[23]
Qi Liu, Biao Xiang, Enhong Chen, Hui Xiong, Fangshuang Tang, and Jeffrey Xu Yu. 2014. Influence maximization over large-scale social networks: A bounded linear approach. In Proceedings of CIKM. 171--180.
[24]
Yuanfu Lu, Ruobing Xie, Chuan Shi, Yuan Fang, Wei Wang, Xu Zhang, and Leyu Lin. 2020. Social Influence Attentive Neural Network for Friend-Enhanced Recommendation. In Proceedings of ECML-PKDD, Vol. 12460. 3--18.
[25]
Hao Ma, Haixuan Yang, Michael R Lyu, and Irwin King. 2008. Mining social networks using heat diffusion processes for marketing candidates selection. In Proceedings of CIKM. 233--242.
[26]
Peter V Marsden and Noah E Friedkin. 1993. Network studies of social influence. Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 22, 1 (1993), 127--151.
[27]
Akash Mittal, Anuj Dhawan, Sahil Manchanda, Sourav Medya, Sayan Ranu, and Ambuj Singh. 2019. Learning heuristics over large graphs via deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03332 (2019).
[28]
Hung T Nguyen, My T Thai, and Thang N Dinh. 2016. Stop-and-stare: Optimal sampling algorithms for viral marketing in billion-scale networks. In Proceedings of SIGMOD. 695--710.
[29]
Leif E Peterson. 2009. K-nearest neighbor. Scholarpedia, Vol. 4, 2 (2009), 1883.
[30]
Thanawin Rakthanmanon, Bilson Campana, Abdullah Mueen, Gustavo Batista, Brandon Westover, Qiang Zhu, Jesin Zakaria, and Eamonn Keogh. 2013. Addressing big data time series: Mining trillions of time series subsequences under dynamic time warping. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, Vol. 7, 3 (2013), 1--31.
[31]
Leonardo FR Ribeiro, Pedro HP Saverese, and Daniel R Figueiredo. 2017. struc2vec: Learning node representations from structural identity. In Proceedings of KDD. 385--394.
[32]
Marko A Rodriguez and Joshua Shinavier. 2010. Exposing multi-relational networks to single-relational network analysis algorithms. Journal of Informetrics, Vol. 4, 1 (2010), 29--41.
[33]
Michael Seufert, Tobias Hoßfeld, Anika Schwind, Valentin Burger, and Phuoc Tran-Gia. 2016. Group-based communication in WhatsApp. In 2016 IFIP networking conference (IFIP networking) and workshops. IEEE, 536--541.
[34]
Jimeng Sun and Jie Tang. 2011. A survey of models and algorithms for social influence analysis. In Social network data analytics. Springer, 177--214.
[35]
Jie Tang, Jimeng Sun, Chi Wang, and Zi Yang. 2009. Social influence analysis in large-scale networks. In Proceedings of KDD. 807--816.
[36]
Jing Tang, Xueyan Tang, Xiaokui Xiao, and Junsong Yuan. 2018. Online processing algorithms for influence maximization. In Proceedings of SIGMOD. 991--1005.
[37]
Youze Tang, Yanchen Shi, and Xiaokui Xiao. 2015. Influence maximization in near-linear time: A martingale approach. In Proceedings of SIGMOD. 1539--1554.
[38]
Youze Tang, Xiaokui Xiao, and Yanchen Shi. 2014. Influence maximization: Near-optimal time complexity meets practical efficiency. In Proceedings of SIGMOD. 75--86.
[39]
Laurens Van der Maaten and Geoffrey Hinton. 2008. Visualizing data using t-SNE. Journal of machine learning research, Vol. 9, 11 (2008).
[40]
Jyun-Cheng Wang and Ching-Hui Chang. 2013. How online social ties and product-related risks influence purchase intentions: A Facebook experiment. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 12, 5 (2013), 337--346.
[41]
Ning Wang, Zi-Yi Wang, Jian-Guo Liu, and Jing-Ti Han. 2019. Maximizing spreading influence via measuring influence overlap for social networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.00248 (2019).
[42]
Xiaoyang Wang, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, and Xuemin Lin. 2016. Efficient distance-aware influence maximization in geo-social networks. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 29, 3 (2016), 599--612.
[43]
Christine B Williams and Girish J?Jeff' Gulati. 2013. Social networks in political campaigns: Facebook and the congressional elections of 2006 and 2008. New Media & Society, Vol. 15, 1 (2013), 52--71.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Deep reinforcement learning-based influence maximization for heterogeneous hypergraphsPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications10.1016/j.physa.2025.130361660(130361)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2025)Multiplex network influence maximization based on representation learning methodApplied Soft Computing10.1016/j.asoc.2025.112956(112956)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Heterogeneous network influence maximization algorithm based on multi-scale propagation strength and repulsive force of propagation fieldKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2024.111580291:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '21: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management
October 2021
4966 pages
ISBN:9781450384469
DOI:10.1145/3459637
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 October 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. influence maximization
  2. social influence
  3. social network analysis

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CIKM '21
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,861 of 8,427 submissions, 22%

Upcoming Conference

CIKM '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)22
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Deep reinforcement learning-based influence maximization for heterogeneous hypergraphsPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications10.1016/j.physa.2025.130361660(130361)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2025)Multiplex network influence maximization based on representation learning methodApplied Soft Computing10.1016/j.asoc.2025.112956(112956)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Heterogeneous network influence maximization algorithm based on multi-scale propagation strength and repulsive force of propagation fieldKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2024.111580291:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Influence maximization in blockchain social networks: a heterogeneous LDAG approachWorld Wide Web10.1007/s11280-024-01308-w27:6Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
  • (2023)A Review on Influence Dissemination in Social Networks2023 International Conference on Computer Applications Technology (CCAT)10.1109/CCAT59108.2023.00025(97-103)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2023
  • (2023)The importance of the language for the evolution of online communitiesExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.119847222:COnline publication date: 15-Jul-2023
  • (2023)K++ ShellComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2023.109916234:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Influence maximization (IM) in complex networks with limited visibility using statistical methodsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-023-05695-180:5(6809-6854)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Influence blocking maximization on networks: Models, methods and applicationsPhysics Reports10.1016/j.physrep.2022.05.003976(1-54)Online publication date: Sep-2022

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media