A Greedy Heuristic for Majority Target Set Selection in Social Networks

The influence of individuals in a network and its propagation is dealt with in several studies in the literature. A well-known model is the majority target set, in which if most of the neighbors of an individual in the network are influenced, then the individual is also influenced. Finding a majority target set of minimum size is an NP-hard problem for general graphs. This paper proposes a heuristic for this problem, which has faster runtimes and achieves better solution values than related works, both on small random instances and on large real social network graphs.