An Exact Algorithm for Robust Influence Maximization

Abstract

We propose a Branch-and-Cut algorithm for the robust influence maximization problem. The influence maximization problem aims to identify, in a social network, a set of given cardinality comprising actors that are able to influence the maximum number of other actors. We assume that the social network is given in the form of a graph with node thresholds to indicate the resistance of an actor to influence, and arc weights to represent the strength of the influence between two actors. In the robust version of the problem that we study, the node thresholds are affected by uncertainty and we optimize over a worst-case scenario within a given robustness budget. Numerical experiments show that we are able to solve to optimality instances of size comparable to other exact approaches in the literature for the non-robust problem, but in addition to this we can also tackle the robust version with similar performance.