A Spectral Method for Activity Shaping in Continuous-Time Information Cascades
This work addresses the problem of managing information spread in social networks for administrators, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing cascade models with a novel optimization approach.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling activity in continuous-time information cascades by developing a framework for activity shaping that allows administrators to allocate targeted resources to alter the spread, resulting in the NetShape method that outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art approaches in simulations on real social networks.
Information Cascades Model captures dynamical properties of user activity in a social network. In this work, we develop a novel framework for activity shaping under the Continuous-Time Information Cascades Model which allows the administrator for local control actions by allocating targeted resources that can alter the spread of the process. Our framework employs the optimization of the spectral radius of the Hazard matrix, a quantity that has been shown to drive the maximum influence in a network, while enjoying a simple convex relaxation when used to minimize the influence of the cascade. In addition, use-cases such as quarantine and node immunization are discussed to highlight the generality of the proposed activity shaping framework. Finally, we present the NetShape influence minimization method which is compared favorably to baseline and state-of-the-art approaches through simulations on real social networks.