Modeling and maximizing influence diffusion in social networks for viral marketing

Modeling influence diffusion in social networks is an important challenge. We investigate influence-diffusion modeling and maximization in the setting of viral marketing, in which a node's influence is measured by the number of nodes it can activate to adopt a new technology or purchase a new product. One of the fundamental problems in viral marketing is to find a small set of initial adopters who can trigger the most further adoptions through word-of-mouth-based influence propagation in the network. We propose a novel multiple-path asynchronous threshold (MAT) model, in which we quantify influence and track its diffusion and aggregation. Our MAT model captures not only direct influence from neighboring influencers but also indirect influence passed along by messengers. Moreover, our MAT framework models influence attenuation along diffusion paths, temporal influence decay, and individual diffusion dynamics. Our work is an important step toward a more realistic diffusion model. Further, we develop an effective and efficient heuristic to tackle the influence-maximization problem. Our experiments on four real-life networks demonstrate its excellent performance in terms of both influence spread and time efficiency. Our work provides preliminary but significant insights and implications for diffusion research and marketing practice.