Model of important user determination in OSN by genetic programming

Online social network (OSN) has become a popular platform of information sharing and communication in the past decade. Regarding the trend, identification of influential spreaders or important users inside OSN is a common approach of improving the message diffusion efficiency. In this research, the objective is to develop a model of simulating the determination of influential spreaders with respect to a special user in OSN. The model would be a multi agent system. It consists of an environment which demonstrates an OSN and each agent inside the model represents a user in OSN. In order to simulate the identification of important users, understanding the way that OSN users estimate important users is essential because the determination task in the model has to been simulate with this strategy. A trial experiment was performed for investigating the possibility for using genetic programming to obtain the strategy of determining important users in OSN. The result shows that the strategy can be achieved by genetic programming and the research can be continued with further extensions.