Influence Analysis in Online Social Networks Using Hypergraphs

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a novel data model for online social networks based on hypergraphs. We show how an influence analysis problem can be properly faced leveraging the introduced network structure. In particular, we implemented a bio-inspired maximization algorithm on the top of the hypergraph model, exploiting the concept of influential path. Preliminary experiments using data of several social networks show how our approach obtains very promising results and encourage the research in this direction.