Influence maximisation in social networks: A target-oriented estimation

Influence maximisation (IM) is the problem of finding a set of k-seed nodes that could maximize the amount of influence spread in a social network. In this article, we point out that the existing methods are taking the source-oriented estimation (SOE), which is the main reason of their failure in accurately estimating the amount of potential influence spread of an individual node. We propose a novel target-oriented estimation (TOE) that understands information diffusion more accurately as well as remedies the drawback of the existing methods. Our extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the existing methods consistently with respect to the quality of the selected seed set.