A bitwise approach on influence overload problem

Abstract

Increasingly developing online social networks has enabled users to send or receive information very fast. However, due to the availability of an excessive amount of data in today’s society, managing the information has become very cumbersome, which may lead to the problem of information overload. This highly eminent problem, where the existence of too much relevant information available becomes a hindrance rather than a help, may cause losses, delays, and hardships in making decisions. Thus, in this paper, by defining information overload from a different aspect, we aim to maximize the information propagation while minimizing the information overload (duplication). To do so, we theoretically present the lower and upper bounds for the information overload using a bitwise-based approach as the leverage to mitigate the computation complexities and obtain an approximation ratio of $1-\frac{1}{e}$. We propose two main algorithms, B-square and C-square, and compare them with the existing algorithms. Experiments on two types of datasets, synthetic and real-world networks, verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach in addressing the problem.