Revisiting Non-Progressive Influence Models: Scalable Influence Maximization

Influence maximization in social networks has been studied extensively in computer science community for the last decade. However, almost all of the efforts have been focused on the progressive influence models, such as independent cascade (IC) and Linear threshold (LT) models, which cannot capture the reversibility of choices. In this paper, we present the Heat Conduction (HC) model which is a non-progressive influence model and has favorable real-world interpretations. Moreover, we show that HC unifies, generalizes, and extends the existing non-progressive models, such as the Voter model [1] and nonprogressive LT [2]. We then prove that selecting the optimal seed set of influential nodes is NP-hard for HC but by establishing the submodularity of influence spread, we can tackle the influence maximization problem with a scalable and provably near-optimal greedy algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present a scalable solution for influence maximization under non-progressive LT model, as a special case of HC model. In sharp contrast to the other greedy influence maximization methods, our fast and efficient C2GREEDY algorithm benefits from two analytically computable steps: closed-form computation for finding the influence spread as well as the greedy seed selection. Through extensive experiments on several and large real and synthetic networks, we show that C2GREEDY outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, under HC model, in terms of both influence spread and scalability.