Maximizing influence under influence loss constraint in social networks

•Formulate a new influence maximization problem in social networks.•Propose a new algorithm to solve the problem.•Improve the new algorithm to achieve more efficiency.•Experiment the methods in four real-world social networks.

Influence maximization is a fundamental research problem in social networks. Viral marketing, one of its applications, aims to select a small set of users to adopt a product, so that the word-of-mouth effect can subsequently trigger a large cascade of further adoption in social networks. The problem of influence maximization is to select a set of K nodes from a social network so that the spread of influence is maximized over the network. Previous research on mining top-K influential nodes assumes that all of the selected K nodes can propagate the influence as expected. However, some of the selected nodes may not function well in practice, which leads to influence loss of top-K nodes. In this paper, we study an alternative influence maximization problem which is naturally motivated by the reliability constraint of nodes in social networks. We aim to find top-K influential nodes given a threshold of influence loss due to the failure of a subset of R(