CNLPSO-SL: A two-layered method for identifying influential nodes in social networks

摘要

In networks, dynamic phenomena such as opinions, behaviors, and information are propagated through connections between entities. Indeed, one of the main issues about a dynamic process is to find a set of individuals with a high influence on other’s decisions which is defined as the “influence maximization” problem, and aims to find a subset of nodes to maximize the total number of adopters at the end of the process. In this paper, by combining the community structure and influence maximization problem, we proposed a two-layered method for identifying influential nodes so that in the first layer an optimization-based method is applied to detect the potential communities. Then, in the second layer, a criterion is used which is a tradeoff between the low-relevant centralities and methods with high complexity. Our method is implemented on real social networks with different scales, and the performance is evaluated by using the total number of infected nodes at the end of the process. The experimental results indicate the superiority of our method in comparison to other considered approaches by considering the efficiency and scalability.