An incremental approach to update influential nodes in dynamic social networks

Detecting the influential nodes in dynamic social networks presents a very recent field that has gained considerable interest from researchers. One interesting approach is to update influential nodes incrementally taking into consideration the structural evolution of the social networks. However, most of the existing methods can only be used to identify influential nodes in static rather than dynamic social networks. In order to solve this problem, we propose an incremental approach for detecting influential nodes by inspecting social networks evolution. First, we identify the influential nodes in the original network. Then, we propose a method for finding the changed elements. Finally, we present our algorithm for updating influential nodes in dynamic social networks. Experimental results on three real dynamic social networks prove that our approach achieves better performance in terms of both influence degree and computational time.