Community Expansion in Social Network

While most existing work about community focus on the community structure and the tendency of one individual joining a community; equally important is to understand social influence from community and to find strategies of attracting new members to join the community, which may benefit a range of applications. In this paper, we formally define the problem of community expansion in social network, which is under the marketing promotional activities scenario. We propose three models, Adopter Model, Benefit Model and Combine Model, to present different promotion strategies over time, taking into consideration the community structure characters. Specifically, Adopter Model is based on the factors that can make an individual come into a community. Benefit Model considers the factors that attract more new members. Combine Model aims to find a balance between Adopter Model and Benefit Model. Then a greedy algorithm ETC is developed for expanding a community over time. Our results from extensive simulation on several real-world networks demonstrate that our Combine Model performs effectively and outperforms other algorithms.