Maximizing the spread of influence via generalized degree discount

Abstract

It is a crucial and fundamental issue to identify a small subset of influential spreaders that can control the spreading process in networks. In previous studies, a degree-based heuristic called DegreeDiscount has been shown to effectively identify multiple influential spreaders and has severed as a benchmark method. However, the basic assumption of DegreeDiscount is not adequate, because it treats all the nodes equally without any differences. To consider a general situation in real world networks, a novel heuristic method named GeneralizedDegreeDiscount is proposed in this paper as an effective extension of original method. In our method, the status of a node is defined as a probability of not being influenced by any of its neighbors, and an index generalized discounted degree of one node is presented to measure the expected number of nodes it can influence. Then the spreaders are selected sequentially upon its generalized discounted degree in current network. Empirical experiments are conducted on four real networks, and the results show that the spreaders identified by our approach are more influential than several benchmark methods. Finally, we analyze the relationship between our method and three common degreebased methods.