Identify Influential Spreaders in Online Social Networks Based on Social Meta Path and PageRank

Identifying “influential spreader” is finding a subset of individuals in the social network, so that when information injected into this subset, it is spread most broadly to the rest of the network individuals. The determination of the information influence degree of individual plays an important role in online social networking. Once there is a list of individuals who have high influence, the marketers can access these individuals and seek them to impress, bribe or somehow make them spread up the good information for their business as well as their product in marketing campaign. In this paper, according to the idea “Information can be spread between two unconnected users in the network as long as they both check-in at the same location”, we proposed an algorithm called SMPRank (Social Meta Path Rank) to identify individuals with the largest influence in complex online social networks. The experimental results show that SMPRank performs better than Weighted LeaderRank because of the ability to determinate more influential spreaders.