Affiliations: [a] Department of Electronics and Informatics, Ryukoku University, Seta, Otsu, Japan | [b] School of Administration and Informatics, University of Shizuoka, Shizuoka, Japan | [c] Department of Integrated Information Technology, Aoyama Gakuin University, Kanagawa, Japan | [d] Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Department of Electronics and Informatics, Ryukoku University, Seta, Otsu 520-2194, Japan. Tel.: +81 77 543 7406; Fax: +81 77 543 7428; E-mail: kimura@rins.ryukoku.ac.jp.
Abstract: We address the problem of estimating the parameters, from observed data in a complex social network, for an information diffusion model that takes time-delay into account, based on the popular independent cascade (IC) model. For this purpose we formulate the likelihood to obtain the observed data which is a set of time-sequence data of infected (active) nodes, and propose an iterative method to search for the parameters (time-delay and diffusion) that maximize this likelihood. We first show by using a synthetic network that the proposed method outperforms the similar existing method. Next, we apply this method to problems of both 1) predicting the influence of nodes for the considered information diffusion model and 2) ranking the influential nodes. Using three large social networks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Keywords: Social network analysis, information diffusion model with time-delay, parameter learning, influence degree prediction, node ranking
