Competitive Opinion Maximization in Social Networks

Influence maximization in social networks has been intensively studied in recent years, where the goal is to find a small set of seed nodes in a social network that maximizes the spread of influence according to a diffusion model. Recent research on influence maximization mainly focuses on incorporating either user opinions or competitive settings in the influence diffusion model. In many real-world applications, however, the influence diffusion process often involves both real-valued opinions from users and multiple parties that are competing with each other. In this paper, we study the problem of competitive opinion maximization, where the game of influence diffusion includes multiple competing products and the goal is to maximize the total opinions of activated users by each product. This problem is very challenging because it is #P-hard and no longer keeps the property of submodularity. We propose a novel model, called ICOM (Iterative Competitive Opinion Maximization), that can effectively and efficiently maximize the total opinions in competitive games by taking user opinions as well as the competitor's strategy into account. Different from existing influence maximization methods, we inhibit the spread of negative opinions and search for the optimal response to opponents' choices of seed nodes. We apply iterative inference based on a greedy algorithm to reduce the computational complexity. Empirical studies on real-world datasets demonstrate that comparing with several baseline methods, our approach can effectively and efficiently improve the total opinions achieved by the promoted product in the competitive network.