An evolutionary framework for maximizing influence propagation in social networks

Social networks are one the main sources of information transmission nowadays. However, not all nodes in social networks are equal: in fact, some nodes are more influential than others, i.e., their information tends to spread more. Finding the most influential nodes in a network – the so-called Influence Maximization problem – is an NP-hard problem with great social and economical implications. Here, we introduce a framework based on Evolutionary Algorithms that includes various graph-aware techniques (spread approximations, domain-specific operators, and node filtering) that facilitate the optimization process. The framework can be applied straightforwardly to various social network datasets, e.g., those in the SNAP repository.