Approximation Algorithms for Budget Splitting in Multi-Channel Influence Maximization
This addresses a practical gap in marketing optimization for commercial houses by providing the first systematic approach to budget splitting across multiple advertising channels.
The paper tackles the problem of allocating a fixed budget across multiple advertising media (billboards and social media) to maximize total influence, introducing the concept of interaction effects between media. The proposed Randomized Greedy and Two-Phase Adaptive Greedy approach achieves an approximation guarantee of (1/α)(1-e^{-γα}) and outperforms existing methods in experiments on real-world datasets.
How to utilize an allocated budget effectively for branding and promotion of a commercial house is an important problem, particularly when multiple advertising media are available. There exist multiple such media, and among them, two popular ones are billboards and social media advertisements. In this context, the question naturally arises: how should a budget be allocated to maximize total influence? Although there is significant literature on the effective use of budgets in individual advertising media, there are hardly any studies examining budget allocation across multiple advertising media. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces the \textsc{Budget Splitting Problem in Billboard and Social Network Advertisement}. We introduce the notion of \emph{interaction effect} to capture the additional influence due to triggers from multiple media of advertising. Using this notion, we propose a noble influence function $Φ(,)$ that captures the total influence and shows that this function is non-negative, monotone, and non-bisubmodular. We introduce \emph{bi-submodularity ratio $(γ)$} and \emph{generalized curvature $(α)$} to measure how close a function is to being bi-submodular and how far a function is from being modular, respectively. We propose the Randomized Greedy and Two-Phase Adaptive Greedy approach, where the influence function is non-bisubmodular and achieves an approximation guarantee of $\frac{1}α\left(1-e^ {-γα} \right)$. We conducted several experiments using real-world datasets and observed that the proposed solution approach's budget splitting leads to a greater influence than existing approaches.