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The paper defines a new theoretical measure Total Influence, of a node as well as a set of nodes in the social network. Total influence uses probabilistic theory to obtain the expected size of the information spreading in the social network under the independent cascade model of diffusion. In order to quantify the size of the spreading practically, the paper proposes a new hybrid simulation methodology for the independent cascade model. The hybrid method uses rough set theory and defines rough knowledge agents around all the seed nodes from which the information is propagating. The lower approximation is calculated using the probabilistic approach, while the size of influence in the boundary region is quantified by Monte-Carlo simulation on a reduced network. The reduce network is formed by compacting all the nodes in the lower approximate region as a super-node. Experimental results on two synthetically generated directed network show that the hybrid method runs magnitude faster than its counterpart with a similar accuracy of the spreading size. © 2020 IEEE.

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

4th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Networks, CINE 2020

Total Influence and Hybrid Simulation of Independent Cascade Model using Rough Knowledge Granules

A high percentage of information that propagates through a social network is sourced from different exogenous sources. E.g., individuals may form their opinions about products based on their own experience or reading a product review, and then share that with their social network. This sharing then diffuses through the network, evolving as a combination of both network and external effects. Besides, different individuals (nodes in a social network) have different degrees of exposition to their external sources, as well. Modeling this influence of external sources is important in order to understand the diffusion process and predict future content sharing patterns. Recognizing this fusion of intrinsic (network) effect and exogenous (external) effect, this paper develops a novel fuzzy relative willingness (FRW) model. Leveraging a fuzzy set approach provides a way to handle the uncertainties arising within the human concept of willingness. We demonstrate that FRW is able to accurately identify both top-k most content producers and diffusion effect based on external influence. We also demonstrate that the fuzzy set theory provides a compelling framework to model uncertainties pertaining to the influence as well as the susceptibility of individuals for both network and exogenous effects. © 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Fulltext

IEEE Access

Fuzzy relative willingness: Modeling influence of exogenous factors in driving information propagation through a social network

This paper describes a new approach of viewing a social relation as a string with various forces acting on it. Accordingly, a tension measure for a relation is defined. Various component forces of the tension measure are identified based on the structural information of the network. A new variant of rough set, namely, double bounded rough set, is developed in order to define these forces mathematically. It is revealed experimentally with synthetic and real-world data that positive and negative tension characterizes, relatively, the presence and absence of a physical link between two nodes. An algorithm based on tension measure is proposed for link prediction. Superiority of the algorithm is demonstrated on nine real-world networks, which include four temporal networks. The source code for calculating tension measure and link prediction algorithm is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/suman5/social-tension-measure. © 2014 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

Double bounded rough set, tension measure, and social link prediction

Social networks are becoming an integral part of the modern society. Popular social network applications like Facebook, Twitter produces data in huge scale. These data shows all the characteristic of Big data. Accordingly, it leads to a deep change in the way social networks were being analyzed. The chapter describes a model of social network and its applications within the purview of information diffusion and community structure in network analysis.Here fuzzy granulation theory is used to model uncertainties in social networks. This provides a new knowledge representation scheme of relational data by taking care of the indiscernibility among the actors as well as the fuzziness in their relations. Various measures of network are defined on this new model. Within the context of this knowledge framework of social network, algorithms for target set selection and community detection are developed. Here the target sets are determined using the newmeasure granular degree, whereas it is granular embeddedness, together with granular degree, which is used for detecting various overlapping communities. The resulting community structures have a fuzzy-rough set theoretic description which allows a node to be a member of multiple communities with different memberships of association only if it falls in the (rough upper - rough lower) approximate region. A new index, called normalized fuzzy mutual information is introduced which can be used to quantify the similarity between two fuzzy partition matrices, and hence the quality of the communities detected. Comparative studies demonstrating the superiority of the model over graph theoretic model is shown through extensive experimental results. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017. All rights reserved.

Handbook of Big Data Technologies

Granular social network: Model and applications

The problem of target set selection for large scale social networks is addressed in the paper. We describe a novel deprecation based greedy strategy to be applied over a pre-ordered (as obtained with any heuristic influence function) set of nodes. The proposed algorithm runs in iteration and has two stages, (i) Estimation: where the performance of each node is evaluated and (ii) Marking: where the nodes to be deprecated in later iterations are marked. We have theoretically proved that for any monotonic and sub-modular influence function, the algorithm correctly identifies the nodes to be deprecated. For any finite set of input nodes it is shown that the algorithm can meet the ending criteria. The worst case performance of the algorithm, both in terms of time and performance, is also analyzed. Experimental results on seven un-weighted as well as weighted social networks show that the proposed strategy improves the ranking of the input seeds in terms of the total number of nodes influenced. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Information Sciences

Deprecation based greedy strategy for target set selection in large scale social networks

Social network data has been modeled with several approaches, including Sociogram and Sociomatrices, which are popular and comprehensive. Similar to these we have developed here a novel modeling technique based on granular computing theory and fuzzy neighborhood systems, which provides a uniform framework to represent social networks. In this model, a social network is represented with a collection of granules. Fuzzy sets are used for defining the granules. The model is named Fuzzy Granular Social Network (FGSN). Familiar measures of networks viz. degree, betweenness, embeddedness and clustering coefficient are redefined in the context of this new framework. Two measures, namely, entropy of FGSN and energy of granules are defined to quantify the uncertainty involved in FGSN arising from fuzziness in the relationships of actors. Experimental results demonstrate the applicability of the model in two well known problems of social networks, namely, target set selection and community detection with comparative studies. © 2015 Elsevier Inc.

FGSN: Fuzzy Granular Social Networks - Model and applications

Community detection in a social network is a well-known problem that has been studied in computer science since early 2000. The algorithms available in the literature mainly follow two strategies, one, which allows a node to be a part of multiple communities with equal membership, and the second considers a disjoint partition of the whole network where a node belongs to only one community. In this paper, we proposed a novel community detection algorithm which identifies fuzzy-rough communities where a node can be a part of many groups with different memberships of their association. The algorithm runs on a new framework of social network representation based on fuzzy granular theory. A new index viz. normalized fuzzy mutual information, to quantify the goodness of detected communities is used. Experimental results on benchmark data show the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared to other well known methods, particularly when the network contains overlapping communities. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Pattern Recognition Letters

Fuzzy-rough community in social networks

The paper addresses the problem of finding top k influential nodes in large scale directed social networks. We propose two new centrality measures, Diffusion Degree for independent cascade model of information diffusion and Maximum Influence Degree. Unlike other existing centrality measures, diffusion degree considers neighbors' contributions in addition to the degree of a node. The measure also works flawlessly with non uniform propagation probability distributions. On the other hand, Maximum Influence Degree provides the maximum theoretically possible influence (Upper Bound) for a node. Extensive experiments are performed with five different real life large scale directed social networks. With independent cascade model, we perform experiments for both uniform and non uniform propagation probabilities. We use Diffusion Degree Heuristic (DiDH) and Maximum Influence Degree Heuristic (MIDH), to find the top k influential individuals. k seeds obtained through these for both the setups show superior influence compared to the seeds obtained by high degree heuristics, degree discount heuristics, different variants of set covering greedy algorithms and Prefix excluding Maximum Influence Arborescence (PMIA) algorithm. The superiority of the proposed method is also found to be statistically significant as per T-test.

Fundamenta Informaticae

Centrality measures, upper bound, and influence maximization in large scale directed social networks

The paper addresses the problem of finding top k influential nodes in large scale directed social networks. We propose a centrality measure for independent cascade model, which is based on diffusion probability (or propagation probability) and degree centrality. We use (i) centrality based heuristics with the proposed centrality measure to get k influential individuals. We have also found the same using (ii) high degree heuristics and (iii) degree discount heuristics. A Monte-Carlo simulation has been conducted with top k-nodes found through different methods. The result of simulation indicates, k nodes obtained through (i) significantly outperform those obtain by (ii) and (iii). We further verify the differences statistically using T-Test and found the minimum significance level (p-value) when k∈>∈5 is 0.022 compare with (ii) and 0.015 when comparing with (iii) for twitter data. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.