Handout: Influence Maximization

The study of social processes by which ideas and innovations diffuse through social networks has been ongoing for more than half a century and as a result a fair understanding of such processes has been achieved. Modern models of social influence have been augmented with various features allowing for arbitrary network structure, non-uniform interactions, probabilistic events and other aspects. This handout will expose you to the basic stochastic model of social influence, i.e., the Independent Cascade Model (ICM), and show how it can be used to find an influential set of nodes to target in order to maximize the final adoption, i.e., the Influence Maximization problem.