Influence Spread in Geo-Social Networks: A Multi-Objective Optimization Perspective

Abstract

As an emerging social dynamic system, geo-social network can be used to facilitate viral marketing through the wide spread of targeted advertising. However, unlike traditional influence spread problem, the heterogeneous spatial distribution has to incorporated into geo-social network environment. Moreover, from the perspective of business managers, it is indispensable to balance the trade-off between the objective of influence spread maximization and objective of promotion cost minimization. Therefore, these two goals need to be seamlessly combined and optimized jointly. In this paper, considering the requirements of real-world applications, we develop a multiobjective optimization based influence spread framework for geo-social networks, revealing the full view of Pareto-optimal solutions for decision makers. Based on the reverse influence sampling (RIS) model, we propose a similarity matching-based RIS sampling method to accommodate diverse users, and then transform our original problem into a weighted coverage problem. Subsequently, to solve this problem, we propose a greedybased incrementally approximation approach and heuristic-based particle swarm optimization approach. Extensive experiments on two real-world geo-social networks clearly validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches.