Complementary influence maximization under comparative linear threshold model.

The influence maximization problem asks to find a small number of early adopters of a product in a social network, such that the expected number of total adoptions is maximized over the network. The problem has been well-studied, but most of the studies focus on the case of a single product or purely competitive products. This paper proposes a new influence diffusion model for multiple complementary products, namely, the comparative linear threshold (Com-LT) model. Under the Com-LT model, we model the complementary relation by reducing the thresholds of nodes. With this model, we study two problems: SelfInfMax and CompInfMax. We prove that these two problems are both NP-Hard under the Com-LT model. For both the SelfInfMax and the CompInfMax problem, we theoretically analyze the monotonicity and submodularity, and accordingly leverage lower bound optimization to devise non-trivial effective approximation algorithms. We conduct experiments over 4 real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the correctness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. • We study the complementary version of the influence maximization problem. • We propose Com-LT model to describe the influence spread of non- competitive products. • We studied the SelfInfMax and the CompInfMax problem and show their hardness. • We propose approximation algorithms with high quality feasible solutions. • We conduct experiments on real networks and show the effectiveness of our algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]