Maximising influence in non-blocking cascades of interacting concepts

Abstract

In large populations of autonomous individuals, the propagation of ideas, strategies or infections is determined by the composite effect of interactions between individuals. The propagation of concepts in a population is a form of influence spread and can be modelled as a cascade from a set of initial individuals through the population. Understanding influence spread and information cascades has many applications, from informing epidemic control and viral marketing strategies to understanding the emergence of conventions in multi-agent systems. Existing work on influence spread has mainly considered single concepts, or small numbers of blocking (exclusive) concepts. In this paper we focus on non-blocking cascades, and propose a new model for characterising concept interaction in an independent cascade. Furthermore, we propose two heuristics, Concept Aware Single Discount and Expected Infected, for identifying the individuals that will maximise the spread of a particular concept, and show that in the non-blocking multi-concept setting our heuristics out-perform existing methods.