Finding Influencers in Complex Networks: An Effective Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Maximizing influences in complex networks is a practically important but computationally challenging task for social network analysis, due to its NP- hard nature. Most current approximation or heuristic methods either require tremendous human design efforts or achieve unsatisfying balances between effectiveness and efficiency. Recent machine learning attempts only focus on speed but lack performance enhancement. In this paper, different from previous attempts, we propose an effective deep reinforcement learning model that achieves superior performances over traditional best influence maximization algorithms. Specifically, we design an end-to-end learning framework that combines graph neural network as the encoder and reinforcement learning as the decoder, named DREIM. Trough extensive training on small synthetic graphs, DREIM outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on very large synthetic and real-world networks on solution quality, and we also empirically show its linear scalability with regard to the network size, which demonstrates its superiority in solving this problem.

A Fast Algorithm for Moderating Critical Nodes via Edge Removal

Critical nodes in networks are extremely vulnerable to malicious attacks to trigger negative cascading events such as the spread of misinformation and diseases. Therefore, effective moderation of critical nodes is very vital for mitigating the potential damages caused by such malicious diffusions. The current moderation methods are computationally expensive. Furthermore, they disregard the fundamental metric of information centrality, which measures the dissemination power of nodes. We investigate the problem of removing $k$ edges from a network to minimize the information centrality of a target node $\lea$ while preserving the network's connectivity. We prove that this problem is computationally challenging: it is NP-complete and its objective function is not supermodular. However, we propose three approximation greedy algorithms using novel techniques such as random walk-based Schur complement approximation and fast sum estimation. One of our algorithms runs in nearly linear time in the number of edges. To complement our theoretical analysis, we conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on synthetic and real networks with over one million nodes. Across various settings, the experimental results illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms.