A survey on influence maximization in a social network

Abstract

Given a social network with diffusion probabilities as edge weights and a positive integer k, which k nodes should be chosen for initial injection of information to maximize the influence in the network? This problem is popularly known as the Social Influence Maximization Problem (SIM Problem). This is an active area of research in computational social network analysis domain, since one and half decades or so. Due to its practical importance in various domains, such as viral marketing, target advertisement and personalized recommendation, the problem has been studied in different variants, and different solution methodologies have been proposed over the years. This paper presents a survey on the progress in and around SIM Problem. At last, it discusses current research trends and future research directions as well.