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Social networks are important media for spreading information, ideas, and influence among individuals. Most existing research focuses on understanding the characteristics of social networks, investigating how information is spread through the "word-of-mouth" effect of social networks, or exploring social influences among individuals and groups. However, most studies ignore negative influences among individuals and groups. Motivated by the goal of alleviating social problems, such as drinking, smoking, and gambling, and influence-spreading problems, such as promoting new products, we consider positive and negative influences, and propose a new optimization problem called the Minimum-sized Positive Influential Node Set (MPINS) selection problem to identify the minimum set of influential nodes such that every node in the network can be positively influenced by these selected nodes with no less than a threshold of θ. Our contributions are threefold. First, we prove that, under the independent cascade model considering positive and negative influences, MPINS is APX-hard. Subsequently, we present a greedy approximation algorithm to address the MPINS selection problem. Finally, to validate the proposed greedy algorithm, we conduct extensive simulations and experiments on random graphs and seven different real-world data sets that represent small-, medium-, and large-scale networks.


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Spreading Social Influence with both Positive and Negative Opinions in Online Networks

Show Author's information Jing (Selena) He( )Meng HanShouling JiTianyu DuZhao Li
College of Computing and Software Engineering at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA 30144, USA.
Department of Computer Science at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China.
Alibaba Group, Hangzhou 310052, China.

Abstract

Social networks are important media for spreading information, ideas, and influence among individuals. Most existing research focuses on understanding the characteristics of social networks, investigating how information is spread through the "word-of-mouth" effect of social networks, or exploring social influences among individuals and groups. However, most studies ignore negative influences among individuals and groups. Motivated by the goal of alleviating social problems, such as drinking, smoking, and gambling, and influence-spreading problems, such as promoting new products, we consider positive and negative influences, and propose a new optimization problem called the Minimum-sized Positive Influential Node Set (MPINS) selection problem to identify the minimum set of influential nodes such that every node in the network can be positively influenced by these selected nodes with no less than a threshold of θ. Our contributions are threefold. First, we prove that, under the independent cascade model considering positive and negative influences, MPINS is APX-hard. Subsequently, we present a greedy approximation algorithm to address the MPINS selection problem. Finally, to validate the proposed greedy algorithm, we conduct extensive simulations and experiments on random graphs and seven different real-world data sets that represent small-, medium-, and large-scale networks.

Keywords: social networks, greedy algorithm, influence spread, positive influential node set, positive and negative influences

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Received: 20 July 2018
Accepted: 19 September 2018
Published: 21 May 2019
Issue date: June 2019

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© The author(s) 2019

Acknowledgements

This research was funded in part by the Kennesaw State University College of Science and Mathematics Interdisciplinary Research Opportunities (IDROP) Program, the Provincial Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang, China (No. 2016C01G2010916), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute for Frontier Technologies (A.Z.F.T.) (No. XT622017000118), and the CCF-Tencent Open Research Fund (No. AGR20160109).

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