Faculty Publications

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    Social network pruning for building optimal social network: A user perspective
    (Elsevier B.V., 2017) Sumith, N.; Annappa, B.; Bhattacharya, S.
    Social networks with millions of nodes and edges are difficult to visualize and understand. Therefore, approaches to simplify social networks are needed. This paper addresses the problem of pruning social network while not only retaining but also improving its information propagation properties. The paper presents an approach which examines the nodal attribute of a node and develops a criterion to retain a subset of nodes to form a pruned graph of the original social network. To authenticate feasibility of the proposed approach to information propagation process, it is evaluated on small world properties such as average clustering coefficient, diameter, path length, connected components and modularity. The pruned graph, when compared to original social network, shows improvement in small world properties which are essential for information propagation. Results also give a significantly more refined picture of social network, than has been previously highlighted. The efficacy of the pruned graph is demonstrated in the information diffusion process under Independent Cascade (IC) and Linear Threshold (LT) models on various seeding strategies. In all size ranges and across various seeding strategies, the proposed approach performs consistently well in IC model and outperforms other approaches in LT model. Although, the paper discusses the problem with the context of information propagation for viral marketing, the pruned graph generated from the proposed approach is also suitable for any application, where information propagation has to take place reasonably fast and effectively. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.
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    A holistic approach to influence maximization in social networks: STORIE
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2018) Sumith, N.; Annappa, B.; Bhattacharya, S.
    Crowd sourcing techniques are used in social networks to propagate information at a faster pace through campaigns. One of the challenges of crowd sourcing system is to recruit right users to be a part of successful campaigns. Fetching this right group of people, who influence a vast population to adopt information, is termed as influence maximization. Concerns of scalability and effectiveness need an effective and a viable solution. This paper proposes the solution in three stages. At the first stage, the large social network is pruned based on the nodal properties to make the solution scalable. At the second stage, Outdegree Rank (OR), is proposed and at the third stage, Influence Estimation (IE) approach estimates user influence. This work amalgamates aspects of structure, heuristic and user influence, to form STORIE. The proposed approach is compared to standard heuristics, on various experimental setups such as RNNDp, RNUDp and TVM. The spread of information is observed for HEP, PHY, Twitter, Infectious and YouTube data, under Independent Cascade model and STORIE gives optimal results, with an increase up to 50%. Although the paper discusses influence maximization, the proposed approach is also applicable to understand the spread of epidemics, computer virus, and rumor spreading in the real world and can also be extended to detect anomalies in web and social networks. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.
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    Influence maximization in large social networks: Heuristics, models and parameters
    (Elsevier B.V., 2018) Sumith, N.; Annappa, B.; Bhattacharya, S.
    Online social networks play a major role not only in socio psychological front, but also in the economic aspect. The way social network serves as a platform of information spread, has attracted a wide range of applications at its doorstep. In recent years, lot of efforts are directed to use the phenomenon of vast spread of information, via social networks, in various applications, ranging from poll analysis, product marketing, identifying influential users and so on. One such application that has gained research attention is the influence maximization problem. The influence maximization problem aims to fetch the top influential users in the social networks. The aim of the paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis on the state of art approaches towards identifying influential users. In this review, we discuss various challenges and approaches to identify influential users in online social networks. This review concludes with future research direction, helping researchers to bring possible improvements to the existing body of work. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.