International Business Machines Corporation
INFLUENCE MAXIMIZATION ON SOCIAL NETWORKS WITH TENSOR BANDITS

Abstract:

A computer-implemented method, a computer program product, and a computer system for influence maximization on a social network. A computing device or server receives a graph of a social network and a user contextual tensor. With a tensor regression model, the computing device or server predicts activation probabilities of respective first users influencing respective second users, using a tensor inner product of the user contextual tensor and a susceptibility tensor and using an upper confidence bound. The computing device or server determines a set of seed users that maximizes influence in the social network, based on the activation probabilities. The computing device or server updates the susceptibility tensor by machine learning, based on user responses online and the user contextual tensor. The computing device or server updates the activation probabilities and the set of the seed users, based on an updated susceptibility tensor.