English

How to go Viral: Cheaply and Quickly

Social and Information Networks 2015-02-17 v5 Data Structures and Algorithms Combinatorics

Abstract

Given a social network represented by a graph GG, we consider the problem of finding a bounded cardinality set of nodes SS with the property that the influence spreading from SS in GG is as large as possible. The dynamics that govern the spread of influence is the following: initially only elements in SS are influenced; subsequently at each round, the set of influenced elements is augmented by all nodes in the network that have a sufficiently large number of already influenced neighbors. While it is known that the general problem is hard to solve --- even in the approximate sense --- we present exact polynomial time algorithms for trees, paths, cycles, and complete graphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.3033,
  title  = {How to go Viral: Cheaply and Quickly},
  author = {Ferdinando Cicalese and Gennaro Cordasco and Luisa Gargano and Martin Milanic and Joseph Peters and Ugo Vaccaro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.3033},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

An extended abstract of this paper will appear in Proceedings of Seventh International conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2014), Lectures Notes in Computer Science, Springer

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:48:35.098Z