High Quality Degree Based Heuristics for the Influence Maximization Problem

Abstract: The problem of influence maximization is to select the most influential individuals in a social network. With the popularity of social network sites, and the development of viral marketing, the importance of the problem has been increased. The influence maximization problem is NP-hard, and therefore, there will not exist a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the problem unless P=NP. Many heuristics are proposed to find a nearly good solution in a shorter time. In this paper, we propose two heuristic algorithms to find good solutions. The heuristics are based on two ideas: (1) vertices of high degree have more influence in the network, and (2) nearby vertices influence on almost analogous sets of vertices. We evaluate our algorithms on several well-known data sets and show that our heuristics achieve better results (up to $15\%$ in influence spread) for this problem in a shorter time (up to $85\%$ improvement in the running time).