Leveraging cross-network information for graph sparsification in influence maximization

When tackling large-scale influence maximization (IM) problem, one effective strategy is to employ graph sparsification as a pre-processing step, by removing a fraction of edges to make original networks become more concise and tractable for the task. In this work, a Cross-Network Graph Sparsification (CNGS) model is proposed to leverage the influence backbone knowledge pre-detected in a source network to predict and remove the edges least likely to contribute to the influence propagation in the target networks. Experimental results demonstrate that conducting graph sparsification by the proposed CNGS model can obtain a good trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness of IM, i.e., existing IM greedy algorithms can run more efficiently, while the loss of influence spread can be made as small as possible in the sparse target networks.