Triadic Closure Sensitive Influence Maximization

The influence are not linked to any footnote in the text. Please check and suggest. maximization problem aims at selecting the k most influential nodes (i.e., seed nodes) from a social network, where the nodes can maximize the number of influenced nodes activated by a certain propagation model. However, the widely used Independent Cascade model shares the same propagation probability among substantial adjacent node pairs, which is too idealistic and unreasonable in practice. In addition, most heuristic algorithms for influence maximization need to update the expected influence of the remaining nodes in the seed selection process, resulting in high computation cost. To address these non-trivial problems, we propose a novel edge propagation probability calculation method. The method first utilizes the triadic closure structure of social networks to precisely measure the closeness between nodes and assigns different propagation probabilities to each edge, deriving a Triadic Closure-based Independent Cascade (TC-IC) model. Then, we further propose a heuristic influence maximization algorithm named Triadic Closure-based Influence Maximization (TC-IM). The algorithm evaluates the expected influence of a node by integrating the triadic closure weighted propagation probability and the triadic closure weighted degree. Especially, in the seed selection process, only the most influential node that has not been updated in the current round needs to be updated, which significantly improves the efficiency. Besides, we further provide theoretical proofs to guarantee the correctness of this updating strategy. Experimental results on nine real datasets and three propagation models demonstrate that: (1) The TC-IC model can set a proper propagation probability for each node pair, where the IM algorithms could easily identify influential nodes; (2) The TC-IM algorithm can significantly reduce the complexity through an efficient updating strategy with a comparable influence spread to the approximation IM algorithms; (3) Besides, the TC-IM algorithm also exhibits stable performance under other IC models including UIC and WIC, exhibiting good stability and generality.