LAIM: A Linear Time Iterative Approach for Efficient Influence Maximization in Large-Scale Networks

The problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in recent years and has many practical applications such as social advertising and viral marketing. Given the network and diffusion model, IM aims to find an influential set of seed nodes so that targeting them as diffusion sources will trigger the maximum cascade of influenced individuals. The largest challenge of the IM problem is its NP-hardness, and most of the existing approaches are with polynomial time complexity, making themselves unscalable to very large networks. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose LAIM: a linear time iterative approach for efficient IM on large-scale networks. Our framework has two steps: 1) influence approximation and 2) seed set selection. In the first step, we propose an iterative algorithm to compute the local influence of a node based on a recursive formula and use the local influence to approximate its global influence. In the second step, the k influential seed nodes are mined based on the approximated influence in the first step. Based on our model, we theoretically prove that the proposed approach has linear time and space complexity. We further accelerate our algorithm with simple modifications and propose its fast version. Experimental results on eight real-world large-scale networks exhibit the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.