Coverage functions are an important class of discrete functions that capture the law of diminishing returns arising naturally from applications in social network analysis, machine learning, and algorithmic game theory. In this paper, we propose a new problem of learning time-varying coverage functions, and develop a novel parametrization of these functions using random features. Based on the connection between time-varying coverage functions and counting processes, we also propose an efficient parameter learning algorithm based on likelihood maximization, and provide a sample complexity analysis. We applied our algorithm to the influence function estimation problem in information diffusion in social networks, and show that with few assumptions about the diffusion processes, our algorithm is able to estimate influence significantly more accurately than existing approaches on both synthetic and real world data.

Analyzing these transmission networks plays an important role in understanding the diffusion processes and predicting future events. However, the underlying transmission networks are often hidden and incomplete, and we observe only the time stamps when cascades of events happen. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of uncovering the hidden network only from the cascades. The structure discovery problem is complicated by the fact that the influence between networked entities is heterogeneous, which can not be described by a simple parametric model. Therefore, we propose a kernelbased method which can capture a diverse range of different types of influence without any prior assumption. In both synthetic and real cascade data, we show that our model can better recover the underlying diffusion network and drastically improve the estimation of the transmission functions among networked entities.

If a piece of information is released from a media site, can we predict whether it may spread to one million web pages, in a month? This influence estimation problem is very challenging since both the time-sensitive nature of the task and the requirement of scalability need to be addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a randomized algorithm for influence estimation in continuous-time diffusion networks.

Coverage functions are an important class of discrete functions that capture the law of diminishing returns arising naturally from applications in social network analysis, machine learning, and algorithmic game theory. In this paper, we propose a new problem of learning time-varying coverage functions, and develop a novel parametrization of these functions using random features. Based on the connection between time-varying coverage functions and counting processes, we also propose an efficient parameter learning algorithm based on likelihood maximization, and provide a sample complexity analysis. We applied our algorithm to the influence function estimation problem in information diffusion in social networks, and show that with few assumptions about the diffusion processes, our algorithm is able to estimate influence significantly more accurately than existing approaches on both synthetic and real world data.

We consider the problem of estimating the latent structure of a social network based on the observed information diffusion events, or {\it cascades}. Here for a given cascade, we only observe the times of infection for infected nodes but not the source of the infection. Most of the existing work on this problem has focused on estimating a diffusion matrix without any structural assumptions on it. In this paper, we propose a novel model based on the intuition that an information is more likely to propagate among two nodes if they are interested in similar topics which are also prominent in the information content. In particular, our model endows each node with an influence vector (which measures how authoritative the node is on each topic) and a receptivity vector (which measures how susceptible the node is for each topic). We show how this node-topic structure can be estimated from the observed cascades and prove an analytical upper bound on the estimation error. The estimated model can be used to build recommendation systems based on the receptivity vectors, as well as for marketing based on the influence vectors. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the improved performance and better interpretability of our model compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

A typical viral marketing model identifies influential users in a social network to maximize a single product adoption assuming unlimited user attention, campaign budgets, and time. In reality, multiple products need campaigns, users have limited attention, convincing users incurs costs, and advertisers have limited budgets and expect the adoptions to be maximized soon. Facing these user, monetary, and timing constraints, we formulate the problem as a submodular maximization task in a continuous-time diffusion model under the intersection of a matroid and multiple knapsack constraints. We propose a randomized algorithm estimating the user influence in a network ($|\mathcal{V}|$ nodes, $|\mathcal{E}|$ edges) to an accuracy of $\epsilon$ with $n=\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ randomizations and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n|\mathcal{E}|+n|\mathcal{V}|)$ computations. By exploiting the influence estimation algorithm as a subroutine, we develop an adaptive threshold greedy algorithm achieving an approximation factor $k_a/(2+2 k)$ of the optimal when $k_a$ out of the $k$ knapsack constraints are active. Extensive experiments on networks of millions of nodes demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve the state-of-the-art in terms of effectiveness and scalability.

We study the information-theoretic lower bound of the sample complexity of the correct recovery of diffusion network structures. We introduce a discrete-time diffusion model based on the Independent Cascade model for which we obtain a lower bound of order $\Omega(k \log p)$, for directed graphs of $p$ nodes, and at most $k$ parents per node. Next, we introduce a continuous-time diffusion model, for which a similar lower bound of order $\Omega(k \log p)$ is obtained. Our results show that the algorithm of Pouget-Abadie et al. is statistically optimal for the discrete-time regime. Our work also opens the question of whether it is possible to devise an optimal algorithm for the continuous-time regime.

Coverage functions are an important class of discrete functions that capture the law of diminishing returns arising naturally from applications in social network analysis, machine learning, and algorithmic game theory. In this paper, we propose anew problem of learning time-varying coverage functions, and develop a novel parametrization of these functions using random features. Based on the connection betweentime-varying coverage functions and counting processes, we also propose an efficient parameter learning algorithm based on likelihood maximization, andprovide a sample complexity analysis. We applied our algorithm to the influence function estimation problem in information diffusion in social networks, and show that with few assumptions about the diffusion processes, our algorithm is able to estimate influence significantly more accurately than existing approaches on both synthetic and real world data.

If a piece of information is released from a media site, can it spread, in 1 month, to a million web pages? This influence estimation problem is very challenging since both the time-sensitive nature of the problem and the issue of scalability need to be addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a randomized algorithm for influence estimation in continuous-time diffusion networks. Our algorithm can estimate the influence of every node in a network with $|\Vcal|$ nodes and $|\Ecal|$ edges to an accuracy of $\epsilon$ using $n=O(1/\epsilon^2)$ randomizations and up to logarithmic factors $O(n|\Ecal|+n|\Vcal|)$ computations. When used as a subroutine in a greedy influence maximization algorithm, our proposed method is guaranteed to find a set of nodes with an influence of at least $(1 - 1/e)\operatorname{OPT} - 2\epsilon$, where $\operatorname{OPT}$ is the optimal value. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that the proposed method can easily scale up to networks of millions of nodes while significantly improves over previous state-of-the-arts in terms of the accuracy of the estimated influence and the quality of the selected nodes in maximizing the influence.

Information, disease, and influence diffuse over networks of entities in both natural systems and human society. Analyzing these transmission networks plays an important role in understanding the diffusion processes and predicting events in the future. However, the underlying transmission networks are often hidden and incomplete, and we observe only the time stamps when cascades of events happen. In this paper, we attempt to address the challenging problem of uncovering the hidden network only from the cascades. The structure discovery problem is complicated by the fact that the influence among different entities in a network are heterogeneous, which can not be described by a simple parametric model. Therefore, we propose a kernel-based method which can capture a diverse range of different types of influence without any prior assumption. In both synthetic and real cascade data, we show that our model can better recover the underlying diffusion network and drastically improve the estimation of the influence functions between networked entities.