Two evidential data based models for influence maximization in Twitter

- An evidential influence measure for Twitter was proposed.
- Many influence aspects were considered in the proposed measure.
- Two evidential influence maximization models were introduced.
- The performance of the proposed models compared to existing ones was shown.

Influence maximization is the problem of selecting a set of influential users in the social network. Those users could adopt the product and trigger a large cascade of adoptions through the “word of mouth” effect. In this paper, we propose two evidential influence maximization models for Twitter social network. The proposed approach uses the theory of belief functions to estimate users influence. Furthermore, the proposed influence estimation measure fuses many influence aspects in Twitter, like the importance of the user in the network structure and the popularity of user's tweets (messages). In our experiments, we compare the proposed solutions to existing ones and we show the performance of our models.