A Diffusion Model for Maximizing Influence Spread in Large Networks

Influence spread is an important phenomenon that occurs in many social networks. Influence maximization is the corresponding problem of finding the most influential nodes in these networks. In this paper, we present a new influence diffusion model, based on pairwise factor graphs, that captures dependencies and directions of influence among neighboring nodes. We use an augmented belief propagation algorithm to efficiently compute influence spread on this model so that the direction of influence is preserved. Due to its simplicity, the model can be used on large graphs with high-degree nodes, making the influence maximization problem practical on large, real-world graphs. Using large Flixster and Epinions datasets, we provide experimental results showing that our model predictions match well with ground-truth influence spreads, far better than other techniques. Furthermore, we show that the influential nodes identified by our model achieve significantly higher influence spread compared to other popular models. The model parameters can easily be learned from basic, readily available training data. In the absence of training, our approach can still be used to identify influential seed nodes.