Resumen
The evolution and spread of social networks have attracted the interest of the scientific community in the last few years. Specifically, several new interesting problems, which are hard to solve, have arisen in the context of viral marketing, disease analysis, and influence analysis, among others. Companies and researchers try to find the elements that maximize profit, stop pandemics, etc. This family of problems is collected under the term Social Network Influence Maximization problem (SNIMP), whose goal is to find the most influential users (commonly known as seeds) in a social network, simulating an influence diffusion model. SNIMP is known to be an NP-hard problem and, therefore, an exact algorithm is not suitable for solving it optimally in reasonable computing time. The main drawback of this optimization problem lies on the computational effort required to evaluate a solution. Since each node is infected with a certain probability, the objective function value must be calculated through a Monte Carlo simulation, resulting in a computationally complex process. The current proposal tries to overcome this limitation by considering a metaheuristic algorithm based on the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) framework to design a quick solution procedure for the SNIMP. Our method consists of two distinct stages: construction and local search. The former is based on static features of the network, which notably increases its efficiency since it does not require to perform any simulation during construction. The latter involves a local search based on an intelligent neighborhood exploration strategy to find the most influential users based on swap moves, also aiming for an efficient processing. Experiments performed on 7 well-known social network datasets with 5 different seed set sizes confirm that the proposed algorithm is able to provide competitive results in terms of quality and computing time when comparing it with the best algorithms found in the state of the art.
Isaac Lozano-Osorio
Doctor en Inteligencia Artificial
Isaac Lozano se graduó en el Doble grado de Ingeniería Informática e Ingeniería de Computadores por la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Al finalizar el doble grado, fue galardonado con el premio al Mejor Proyecto Fin de Carrera. Posteriormente, realizó un Máster en Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial (UIMP) y es doctor por la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Sus principales intereses de investigación se centran en la interfaz entre las Ciencias de la Computación, la Inteligencia Artificial y la Investigación Operativa. La mayoría de sus publicaciones tratan sobre el desarrollo de procedimientos metaheurísticos para problemas de optimización modelados por grafos.
Jesús Sánchez-Oro
Profesor Titular de Universidad
Profesor Titular del Departamento de Informática, siendo uno de los investigadores principales del Grupo de Investigación de Algoritmos para la Optimización GRAFO.
Abraham Duarte
Catedrático de Universidad
Mi carrera investigadora se ha centrado en el desarrollo de nuevos algoritmos y técnicas de Inteligencia Computacional (metaheurísticas) y su aplicación a diferentes problemas en Ciencia e Ingeniería desde que me incorporé a la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) en el octubre del año 2000.