The objective of viral marketing is to leverage a social network to spread awareness about a specific product in the market through information propagation via word-of-mouth. A closely related problem is that of influence maximization which aims to identify the ‘best’ set of ‘influential’ users (seeds) to give discounts or free products to, such that awareness about the product is maximized. We...

Recent work theoretically connected the problem of seed set expansions with personalized page rank by showing that the optimal weights of random walk landing probabilities when constructing a classifier for community detection of nodes in the stochastic block model followed the weights in personalized page rank [3]. One drawback of the stochastic block model is that it can be unrealistic as a m...