Motif-aware diffusion network inference

Characterizing and understanding information diffusion over social networks play an important role in various real-world applications. In many scenarios, however, only the states of nodes can be observed while the underlying diffusion networks are unknown. Many methods have therefore been proposed to infer the underlying networks based on node observations. To enhance the inference performance, structural priors of the networks, such as sparsity, scale-free, and community structures, are often incorporated into the learning procedure. As the building blocks of networks, network motifs occur frequently in many social networks, and play an essential role in describing the network structures and functionalities. However, to the best of our knowledge, no existing work exploits this kind of structural primitives in diffusion network inference. In order to address this unexplored yet important issue, in this paper, we propose a novel framework called Motif-Aware Diffusion Network Inference (MADNI), which aims to mine the motif profile from the node observations and infer the underlying network based on the mined motif profile. The mined motif profile and the inferred network are alternately refined until the learning procedure converges. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.