We consider the canonical problem of influence maximization in social networks. Since the seminal work of Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos there have been two, largely disjoint efforts on this problem. The first studies the problem associated with learning the generative model that produces cascades, and the second focuses on the algorithmic challenge of identifying a set of influencers, assuming the generative model is known. Recent results on learning and optimization imply that in general, if the generative model is not known but rather learned from training data, no algorithm for influence maximization can yield a constant factor approximation guarantee using polynomially-many samples, drawn from any distribution. In this paper we describe a simple algorithm for maximizing influence from training data. The main idea behind the algorithm is to leverage the strong community structure of social networks and identify a set of individuals who are influentials but whose communities have little overlap. Although in general, the approximation guarantee of such an algorithm is unbounded, we show that this algorithm performs well experimentally. To analyze its performance, we prove this algorithm obtains a constant factor approximation guarantee on graphs generated through the stochastic block model, traditionally used to model networks with community structure.

We propose a novel class of network models for temporal dyadic interaction data. Our objective is to capture important features often observed in social interactions: sparsity, degree heterogeneity, community structure and reciprocity. We use mutually-exciting Hawkes processes to model the interactions between each (directed) pair of individuals. The intensity of each process allows interactions to arise as responses to opposite interactions (reciprocity), or due to shared interests between individuals (community structure). For sparsity and degree heterogeneity, we build the non time dependent part of the intensity function on compound random measures following Todeschini et al., 2016. We conduct experiments on real-world temporal interaction data and show that the proposed model outperforms competing approaches for link prediction, and leads to interpretable parameters.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

The metric backbone of a weighted graph is the union of all-pairs shortest paths.

In this paper, we propose a novel metric calledcompression ratioto capture the effect of PCA on high-dimensional noisy data.

A.1 CommunityDetection The spectral clustering algorithm for directed networks that we consider in this paper is shown in Algorithm A.1. It can be applied either to the weighted adjacency (count) matrixN or the unweighted adjacency matrixA, where Aij =1{Nij >0} and 1{ } denotes the indicator function of the argument. This algorithm is used for the community detection step in our proposed CHIP estimationprocedure. For undirectednetworks, which we use for the theoreticalanalysisin Section 4, spectral clustering is performed by running k-means clustering on the rows of theeigenvector matrix of N or A, not the rows of the concatenated singular vector matrix. A.2 Estimation of Hawkes process parameters Ozaki (1979) derived the log-likelihood function for Hawkes processes with exponential kernels, which takes the form: logL= µT+ The threeparameters µ,α,β can be estimatedby maximizing (A.1) using standard numerical methods for non-linear optimization (Nocedal & Wright, 2006). We provide closed-form equations for estimating mab =αab/βab and µab in (2).