A Social Influence Model Based On Circuit Theory

Understanding the behaviors of information propagation is essential for the effective exploitation of social influence in social networks. However, few existing influence models are tractable and efficient for describing the information propagation process, especially when dealing with the difficulty of incorporating the effects of combined influences from multiple nodes. To this end, in this paper, we provide a social influence model that alleviates this obstacle based on electrical circuit theory. This model vastly improves the efficiency of measuring the influence strength between any pair of nodes, and can be used to interpret the real-world influence propagation process in a coherent way. In addition, this circuit theory model provides a natural solution to the social influence maximization problem. When applied to real-world data, the circuit theory model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can greatly alleviate the computation burden of the influence maximization problem.