Know by a handful the whole sack: efficient sampling for top-k influential user identification in large graphs

Influence Maximization aims to find the top-K influential individuals to maximize the influence spread within a social network, which remains an important yet challenging problem. Most existing greedy algorithms mainly focus on computing the exact influence spread, leading to low computational efficiency and limiting their application to real-world social networks. While in this paper we show that through supervised sampling, we can efficiently estimate the influence spread at only negligible cost of precision, thus significantly reducing the execution time. Motivated by this, we propose ESMCE, a power-law exponent supervised Monte Carlo estimation method. In particular, ESMCE exploits the power-law exponent of the social network to guide the sampling, and employs multiple iterative steps to guarantee the estimation accuracy. Moreover, ESMCE shows excellent scalability and well suits large-scale social networks. Extensive experiments on six real-world social networks demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art greedy algorithms, ESMCE is able to achieve almost two orders of magnitude speedup in execution time with only negligible error (2.21 % on average) in influence spread.