Boosting Nodes for Improving the Spread of Influence

Abstract: Information diffusion in networks has received a lot of recent attention. Most previous work addresses the influence maximization problem of selecting an appropriate set of seed nodes to initiate the diffusion process so that the largest number of nodes is reached. Since the seed selection problem is NP hard, most solutions are sub-optimal. Furthermore, there may be settings in which the seed nodes are predetermined. Thus, a natural question that arise is: given a set of seed nodes, can we select a small set of nodes such that if we improve their reaction to the diffusion process, the largest increase in diffusion spread is achieved? We call this problem, the boost set selection problem. In this paper, we formalize this problem, study its complexity and propose appropriate algorithms. We also evaluate the effect of boosting in a number of real networks and report the increase of influence spread achieved for different seed sets, time limits in the diffusion process and other diffusion parameters.