Identifying multiple influential users based on the overlapping influence in multiplex networks

Online social networks (OSNs) are interaction platforms that can promote knowledge spreading, rumor propagation, and virus diffusion. Identifying influential users in OSNs is of great significance for accelerating the information propagation especially when information is able to travel across multiple channels. However, most previous studies are limited to a single network or select multiple influential users based on the centrality ranking result of each user, not addressing the overlapping influence (OI) among users. In practice, the collective influence of multiple users is not equal to the total sum of these users influences. In this paper, we propose a novel OI-based method for identifying multiple influential users in multiplex social networks. We first define the effective spreading shortest path (ESSP) by utilizing the concept of spreading rate in order to denote the relative location of users. Then, the collective influence is quantified by taking the topological factor and the location distribution of users into account. The identified users based on our proposed method are central and relatively scattered with a low overlapping influence. With the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, we estimate our proposed method with other benchmark algorithms. Experimental results in both synthetic and real-world networks verify that our proposed method has a better performance in terms of the spreading efficiency.