IM‐SSO: Maximizing influence in social networks using social spider optimization

Summary Online social networks play a pivotal role in the propagation of information and influence as in the form of word‐of‐mouth spreading. The influence maximization (IM) problem is a fundamental problem to identify a small set of individuals, which have a maximal influence spread in the social network. Unfortunately, the IM problem is NP‐hard. It has been depicted that a hill‐climbing greedy approach gives a good approximation guarantee. However, it is inefficient to run on large‐scale social networks. In this paper, a global influence evaluation function is presented for the IM optimization problem. The global influence evaluation function provides a reliable expected diffusion value of influence spread under the traditional diffusion models. To optimize global influence evaluation function, an influence maximization algorithm based on social spider optimization (IM‐SSO) is presented. IM‐SSO redefines the representation and update rule of spider's vibration and performs random walk towards target vibration. The algorithm uses a jump away process to overcome the weakness of premature convergence. The experimental results on six real‐world social networks show that the proposed algorithm is more effective than the state‐of‐the‐art heuristics and more time‐efficient than CELF++, static greedy, and PSO with an approximate influence spread.