A dominating set based approach to identify effective leader group of social network

Abstract

Very recently, the study of social networks has received a huge attention since we can learn and understand many hidden properties of our society. This paper investigates the potential of social network analysis to select an effective leadership group of a society. Based on our real life observation, we establish three essential requirements for an effective leadership group, namely Influenceability, Partisanship, and Bipartisanship. Then, we formulate the problem of finding a minimum size leader group satisfying the three requirements as the minimum connected k-core dominating set problem (MCkCDSP), and show its NP-hardness. In addition, we introduce an extension of MCkCDSP, namely MCkCDSP-C, which assumes the society has a number of communities and requires at least one representative from each community should be in the leadership. At last, we propose an approximation algorithm for a subclass of MCkCDSP with k = 2, and show an α-approximation algorithm of MCkCDSP can be used to obtain an α-approximation algorithm of MCkCDSP-C. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.