Modeling Community Influence in Social Networks with Markov Chains

Social network analysis has been one of the research focuses with the developing of social media services. Social influence also attracts ever-increasing attention and interests from both the sociology and the data mining scholars, but the research of influence is mainly limited in the user level, the community level influence is rarely involved. In this paper, we develop a novel model to analyze and evaluate the community level influence and help the decision maker to comprehend the disparity in influence of different communities. This paper also proposes a simple heuristic node-selection strategy considering the community influence to spread influence, and the experiments of the spread of influence through the social network datasets prove the rationality of the proposed community influence analysis model.