A novel influence diffusion model based on user generated content in Online Social Networks

Social Network Analysis has been introduced to study the properties of Online Social Networks for a wide range of real life applications. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for solving the Influence Maximization problem, i.e. the problem of finding a small subset of actors in a social network that could maximize the spread of influence. In particular, we define a novel influence diffusion model that, learning recurrent user behaviours from past logs, estimates the probability that a given user can influence the other ones, basically exploiting user to content actions. A greedy maximization algorithm is then adopted to determine the final set of influentials in the network. Preliminary experimental results shows the goodness of the proposed approach, especially in terms of efficiency, and encourage future research in such direction.