Minimizing the expected complete influence time of a social network

Complete influence time specifies how long it takes to influence all individuals in a social network, which plays an important role in many real-life applications. In this paper, we study the problem of minimizing the expected complete influence time of social networks. We propose the incremental chance model to characterize the diffusion of influence, which is progressive and able to achieve complete influence. Theoretical properties of the expected complete influence time under the incremental chance model are presented. In order to trade off between optimality and complexity, we design a framework of greedy algorithms. Finally, we carry out experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.