Self-Stabilizing Selection of Influential Users in Social Networks

Selection of Influential Users is an essential task in influence propagation schemes in social networks. Considering the phenomenon of asymmetric influences between neigh boring users and different sensitivities of users to influences, we propose to select the users in the minimal weighted positive influence dominating set of a social network graph as the influential users to maximize the speed of the propagation. We present the first polynomial time self-stabilizing algorithm for minimal weighted positive influence dominating set in an arbitrary social network. Starting from an arbitrary initial state, the algorithm terminates in O(n³) steps using a distributed scheduler, where n is the number of nodes in the graph. Space requirement at each node is O(log n) bits. Experiments are conducted to verify the correctness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.