A fast and effective algorithm for influence maximization in large-scale independent cascade networks

A characteristic of social networks is the ability to quickly spread information between a large group of people. The widespread use of online social networks (e.g., Facebook) increases the interest of researchers on how influence propagates through these networks. One of the most important research issues in this field is the so-called influence maximization problem, which essentially consists in selecting the most influential users (i.e., those who are able to maximize the spread of influence through the social network). Due to its practical importance in various applications (e.g., viral marketing), such a problem has been studied in several variants. Nevertheless, the current open challenge in the resolution of the influence maximization problem still concerns achieving a good trade-off between accuracy and computational time. In this context, based on independent cascade modeling of social networks, we propose a novel low-complexity and highly accurate algorithm for selecting an initial group of nodes to maximize the spread of influence in large-scale networks. In particular, the key idea consists in iteratively removing the overlap of influence spread induced by different seed nodes. The application to several numerical experiments based on real datasets proves that the proposed algorithm effectively finds practical near-optimal solutions of the addressed influence maximization problem in a computationally efficient fashion. Finally, the comparison with the state of the art algorithms demonstrates that in large scale scenarios the proposed approach shows higher performance in terms of influence spread and running time.