Seed Activation Scheduling for Influence Maximization in Social Networks

This paper addresses the challenge of strategically maximizing the influence spread in a social network, by exploiting cascade propagators termed “seeds”. It introduces the Seed Activation Scheduling Problem (SASP) that chooses the timing of seed activation under a given budget, over a given time horizon, in the presence/absence of competition. The SASP is framed as a blogger-centric marketing problem on a two-level network, where the decisions are made to buy sponsored posts from prominent bloggers at calculated points in time. A Bayesian evidence diffusion model – the Partial Parallel Cascade (PPC) model – allows the network nodes to be partially activated, proportional to their accumulat…