ABEM: An adaptive agent-based evolutionary approach for influence maximization in dynamic social networks

Influence maximization is recognized as a crucial optimization problem, which aims to identify a limited set of influencers to maximize the coverage of influence dissemination in social networks. However, real-world social networks are usually dynamic and large-scale, which leads to difficulty in capturing real-time user and diffusion features to effectively and accurately select the key influencers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive agent-based evolutionary approach to address this challenging issue with agent-based modeling and genetic algorithm. This novel approach identifies the users’ influence capability in a distributed manner and optimizes the influencer set selection in a dynamic environment. An adaptive solution optimizer is proposed as one of the key components, driving the evolutionary process and adapting the candidate solutions dynamically. The proposed approach is also applicable to large-scale networks due to its distributed framework. Evaluation of our approach is performed by using both synthetic networks and real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art seeding algorithms in terms of maximizing influence.