Influence Maximization in Online Social Networks

Starting with the earliest studies showing that the spread of new trends, information, and innovations is closely related to the social influence exerted on people by their social networks, the research on social influence theory took off, providing remarkable evidence on social influence induced viral phenomena. Fueled by the extreme popularity of online social networks and social media, computational social influence has emerged as a subfield of data mining whose goal is to analyze and optimize social influence using computational frameworks such as algorithm design and theoretical modeling. One of the fundamental problems in this field is the problem of influence maximization, primarily motivated by the application of viral marketing. The objective is to identify a small set of users in a social network who, when convinced to adopt a product, shall influence others in the network in a manner that leads to a large number of adoptions. In this tutorial, we extensively survey the research on social influence propagation and maximization, with a focus on the recent algorithmic and theoretical advances. To this end, we provide detailed reviews of the latest research effort devoted to (i) improving the efficiency and scalability of the influence maximization algorithms; (ii) context-aware modeling of the influence maximization problem to better capture real-world marketing scenarios; (iii) modeling and learning of real-world social influence; (iv) bridging the gap between social advertising and viral marketing.