Influence maximization in unknown social networks: Learning Policies for Effective Graph Sampling
Official code for the paper Influence maximization in unknown social networks: Learning Policies for Effective Graph Sampling (to appear at AAMAS 2020).
A serious challenge when finding influential actors in real-worldsocial networks, to enable efficient community-wide interventions, is the lack of knowledge about the structure of the underlying network. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on handcrafted sampling algorithms; these methods sample nodes and their neighbours in a carefully constructed order and choose opinion leaders from this discovered network to maximize influence spread in the(unknown) complete network.In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning frameworkto discover effective network sampling heuristics by leveraging automatically learnt node and graph representations that encodeimportant structural properties of the network. At training time,the method identifies portions of the network such that the nodesselected from this sampled subgraph can effectively influence nodes in the complete network. The output of this training is a transferable, adaptive policy that identifies an effective sequence of nodes toquery on unseen graphs. The success of this policy is underpinned by a set of careful choices for embedding local and global infor-mation about the graph, and providing appropriate reward signals during training. We experiment with real-world social networksfrom four different domains and show that the policies learnedby our RL agent provide a 7-23% improvement over the currentstate-of-the-art method.
Paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.11625.pdf