Abstract-Given a fixed budget and an arbitrary cost for selecting each node, the budgeted influence maximization (BIM) problem concerns selecting a set of seed nodes to disseminate some information that maximizes the total number of nodes influenced (termed as influence spread) in social networks at a total cost no more than the budget. Our proposed seed selection algorithm for the BIM problem guarantees an approximation ratio of (1 − 1/ √ e). The seed selection algorithm needs to calculate the influence spread of candidate seed sets, which is known to be #P-complex. Identifying the linkage between the computation of marginal probabilities in Bayesian networks and the influence spread, we devise efficient heuristic algorithms for the latter problem. Experiments using both large-scale social networks and synthetically generated networks demonstrate superior performance of the proposed algorithm with moderate computation costs. Moreover, synthetic datasets allow us to vary the network parameters and gain important insights on the impact of graph structures on the performance of different algorithms.
In order to build a more realistic problem of viral marketing, Huy Nguyen and Rong Zheng further proposed the budgeted influence maximization problem (BIM), which involves selecting a set of seed nodes to maximize the total number of nodes influenced in social networks at a total cost no more than the budget REF .
On Budgeted Influence Maximization in Social Networks
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Computer Science Physics