Online Processing Algorithms for Influence Maximization

Influence maximization is a classic and extensively studied problem with important applications in viral marketing. Existing algorithms for influence maximization, however, mostly focus on offline processing, in the sense that they do not provide any output to the user until the final answer is derived, and that the user is not allowed to terminate the algorithm early to trade the quality of solution for efficiency. Such lack of interactiveness and flexibility leads to poor user experience, especially when the algorithm incurs long running time. To address the above problem, this paper studies algorithms for online processing of influence maximization (OPIM), where the user can pause the algorithm at any time and ask for a solution (to the influence maximization problem) and its approximation guarantee, and can resume the algorithm to let it improve the quality of solution by giving it more time to run. (This interactive paradigm is similar in spirit to online query processing in database systems.) We show that the only existing algorithm for OPIM is vastly ineffective in practice, and that adopting existing influence maximization methods for OPIM yields unsatisfactory results. Motivated by this, we propose a new algorithm for OPIM with both superior empirical effectiveness and strong theoretical guarantees, and we show that it can also be extended to handle conventional influence maximization. Extensive experiments on real data demonstrate that our solutions outperform the state of the art for both OPIM and conventional influence maximization.