Topic-aware Social Influence Minimization

In this paper, we address the problem of minimizing the negative influence of undesirable things in a network by blocking a limited number of nodes from a topic modeling perspective. When undesirable thing such as a rumor or an infection emerges in a social network and part of users have already been infected, our goal is to minimize the size of ultimately infected users by blocking k nodes outside the infected set. We first employ the HDP-LDA and KL divergence to analysis the influence and relevance from a topic modeling perspective. Then two topic-aware heuristics based on betweenness and out-degree for finding approximate solutions to this problem are proposed. Using two real networks, we demonstrate experimentally the high performance of the proposed models and learning schemes.