Scalable Influence Maximization in Social Networks under the Linear Threshold Model

Influence maximization is the problem of finding a small set of most influential nodes in a social network so that their aggregated influence in the network is maximized. In this paper, we study influence maximization in the linear threshold model, one of the important models formalizing the behavior of influence propagation in social networks. We first show that computing exact influence in general networks in the linear threshold model is #P-hard, which closes an open problem left in the seminal work on influence maximization by Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos, 2003. As a contrast, we show that computing influence in directed a cyclic graphs (DAGs) can be done in time linear to the size of the graphs. Based on the fast computation in DAGs, we propose the first scalable influence maximization algorithm tailored for the linear threshold model. We conduct extensive simulations to show that our algorithm is scalable to networks with millions of nodes and edges, is orders of magnitude faster than the greedy approximation algorithm proposed by Kempe et al. and its optimized versions, and performs consistently among the best algorithms while other heuristic algorithms not design specifically for the linear threshold model have unstable performances on different real-world networks.