Entropy-Based Measure for Influence Maximization in Temporal Networks

The challenge of influence maximization in social networks is tackled in many settings and scenarios. However, the most explored variant is looking at how to choose a seed set of a given size, that maximizes the number of activated nodes for selected model of social influence. This has been studied mostly in the area of static networks, yet other kinds of networks, such as multilayer or temporal ones, are also in the scope of recent research. In this work we propose and evaluate the measure based on entropy, that investigates how the neighbourhood of nodes varies over time, and based on that and their activity ranks, the nodes as possible candidates for seeds are selected. This measure applied for temporal networks intends to favor nodes that vary their neighbourhood highly and, thanks to that, are good spreaders for certain influence models. The results demonstrate that for the Independent Cascade Model of social influence the introduced entropy-based metric outperforms typical seed selection heuristics for temporal networks. Moreover, compared to some other heuristics, it is fast to compute, thus can be used for fast-varying temporal networks.