ACO-IM: maximizing influence in social networks using ant colony optimization

Influence Maximization Based on Snapshot Prediction in Dynamic Online Social Networks

With the vigorous development of the mobile Internet, online social networks have greatly changed the way of life of human beings. As an important branch of online social network research, influence maximization refers to finding K nodes in the network to form the most influential seed set, which is an abstract model of viral marketing. Most of the current research is based on static network structures, ignoring the important feature of network structures changing with time, which discounts the effect of seed nodes in dynamic online social networks. To address this problem in dynamic online social networks, we propose a novel framework called Influence Maximization based on Prediction and Replacement (IMPR). This framework first uses historical network snapshot information to predict the upcoming network snapshot and then mines seed nodes suitable for the dynamic network based on the predicted result. To improve the computational efficiency, the framework also adopts a fast replacement algorithm to solve the seed nodes between different snapshots. The scheme we adopted exhibits four advantages. First, we extended the classic influence maximization problem to dynamic online social networks and give a formal definition of the problem. Second, a new framework was proposed for this problem and a proof of the solution is given in theory. Third, other classical algorithms for influence maximization can be embedded into our framework to improve accuracy. More importantly, to reveal the performance of the scheme, a series of experiments based on different settings on real dynamic online social network datasets were carried out, and the experimental results are very promising.

Influence Maximization Based on Backward Reasoning in Online Social Networks

Along with the rapid development of information technology, online social networks have become more and more popular, which has greatly changed the way of information diffusion. Influence maximization is one of the hot research issues in online social network analysis. It refers to mining the most influential top-K nodes from an online social network to maximize the final propagation of influence in the network. The existing studies have shown that the greedy algorithms can obtain a highly accurate result, but its calculation is time-consuming. Although heuristic algorithms can improve efficiency, it is at the expense of accuracy. To balance the contradiction between calculation accuracy and efficiency, we propose a new framework based on backward reasoning called Influence Maximization Based on Backward Reasoning. This new framework uses the maximum influence area in the network to reversely infer the most likely seed nodes, which is based on maximum likelihood estimation. The scheme we adopted demonstrates four strengths. First, it achieves a balance between the accuracy of the result and efficiency. Second, it defines the influence cardinality of the node based on the information diffusion process and the network topology structure, which guarantees the accuracy of the algorithm. Third, the calculation method based on message-passing greatly reduces the computational complexity. More importantly, we applied the proposed framework to different types of real online social network datasets and conducted a series of experiments with different specifications and settings to verify the advantages of the algorithm. The results of the experiments are very promising.

Towards a Formal Validation of a Hybrid Multi-Agent Routing Protocol for Ad hoc Networks

In our previous papers, a new Ant Routing Protocol for Ad-hoc Networks inspired from ant colony optimization was presented. We introduced a new approach which decreases both of nodes energy consumption and routing overhead within the network. The validation of our routing protocol was based on series of simulation. The results show that our new algorithm provides a significant improvement compared to other protocols. After the algorithm is defined and published, we have found important to validate formally each one of its components in order to avoid any conflict, lack or misbehaving situations. This process requires in a first step a formal specification. This is our main concern in this paper where we propose in a first part a formal specification using inference systems based on logical rules. A formal validation using these inference systems is proposed in a second step in order to prove the correctness, the soundness, the completeness and the optimality of the proposition.

Parallel social behavior-based algorithm for identification of influential users in social network

Influence maximization in social networks refers to the process of finding influential users who make the most of information or product adoption. The social networks is prone to grow exponentially, which makes it difficult to analyze. Critically, most of approaches in the literature focus only on modeling structural properties, ignoring the social behavior in the relations between users. For this, we tend to parallelize the influence maximization task based on social behavior. In this paper, we introduce a new parallel algorithm, named PSAIIM, for identification of influential users in social network. In PSAIIM, we uses two semantic metrics: the user’s interests and the dynamically-weighted social actions as user interactive behaviors. In order to overcome the size of actual real-world social networks and to minimize the execution time, we used the community structure to apply perfect parallelism to the CPU architecture of the machines to compute an optimal set of influential nodes. Experimental results on real-world networks reveal effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to the existing state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms, especially in the speed of calculation.