Taxonomy of Influence Maximization Techniques in Unknown Social Networks

Influence maximization in online social networks (OSNs) is the problem of discovering few nodes or users in the social network termed as ‘seed nodes', which can help the spread of influence in the network. With the tremendous growth in social networking, the influence exerted by users of a social network on other online users has caught the attention of researchers to develop effective influence maximization algorithms to be applied in the field of business strategies. The main application of influence maximization is promoting the product to a set of users. However, a real challenge in influence maximization algorithms to deal with enormous amount of users or nodes obtainable in any OSN is posed. The authors focused on graph mining of OSNs for generating ‘seed sets' using standard influence maximization techniques. Many standard influence maximization models are used for calculation of spread of influence; a novel influence maximization technique, namely the DegGreedy technique, has been illustrated along with experimental results to make a comparative analysis of the existing techniques.