Budgeted Persuasion on User Opinions via Varying Susceptibility

Nowadays, the social network becomes an indispensable part of people’s daily life, meanwhile offers an unprecedentedly convenient access for purposive individuals to influence the opinions of network users. Current studies present a subtle persuasion approach that finds a number of key users meanwhile varies their susceptibility extent to impact the public opinion. Such persuasion is significantly critical for public security, as it could facilitate both the spreading and dispelling of malicious rumors. However, the major body of these studies enclose impractical assumptions, such that persuaders have an unlimited budget, or the costs of varying different users’ susceptibilities are the same, thus rendering these works unsuitable for realistic scenarios. Therefore, this work originally proposes a more practical and generalized problem of persuasion, where varying the susceptibilities of different users holds different costs. The analysis of its non-convexity, non-submodularity and complexity shows that solving the proposed problem is nontrivial, thus inspiring us to provide an intuitive greedy algorithm. Furthermore, we design an accelerated algorithm based on the community property, which reduces the time consumption more than one order of magnitude. The acceleration is based on the intuition that the impact of a user within a proper community could be a good estimation of the impact in the whole network, while the computation of the former one is much more efficient. The relationship between two algorithms is fully analyzed, which shows the community-based algorithm can degenerate to the intuitive greedy algorithm under a specific setting. Finally, comprehensive evaluations on real-world datasets show the superiority of proposed algorithms on both effectiveness and efficiency.