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New Insights from an Analysis of Social Influence Networks under the Linear Threshold Model

We study the spread of influence in a social network based on the Linear Threshold model. We derive an analytical expression for evaluating the expected size of the eventual influenced set for a given initial set, using the probability of activation for each node in the social network. We then provide an equivalent interpretation for the influence spread, in terms of acyclic path probabilities in the Markov chain obtained by reversing the edges in the social network influence graph. We use some properties of such acyclic path probabilities to provide an alternate proof for the submodularity of the influence function. We illustrate the usefulness of the analytical expression in estimating the most influential set, in special cases such as the UILT(Uniform Influence Linear Threshold), USLT(Uniform Susceptance Linear Threshold) and node-degree based influence models. We show that the PageRank heuristic is either provably optimal or performs very well in the above models, and explore its limitations in more general cases. Finally, based on the insights obtained from the analytical expressions, we provide an efficient algorithm which approximates the greedy algorithm for the influence maximization problem.