@inproceedings{sun2020influence, author = {Sun, Lichao and Chen, Albert and Yu, Philip S. and Chen, Wei}, title = {Influence Maximization with Spontaneous User Adoption}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th ACM International WSDM Conference (WSDM)}, year = {2020}, month = {February}, abstract = {We incorporate the realistic scenario of spontaneous user adoption into influence propagation (also refer to as self-activation) and propose the self-activation independent cascade (SAIC) model: nodes may be self activated besides being selected as seeds, and influence propagates from both selected seeds and self activated nodes. Self activation occurs in many real world situations; for example, people naturally share product recommendations with their friends, even without marketing intervention. Under the SAIC model, we study three influence maximization problems: (a) boosted influence maximization (BIM) aims to maximize the total influence spread from both self-activated nodes and k selected seeds; (b) preemptive influence maximization (PIM) aims to find k nodes that, if self-activated, can reach the most number of nodes before other self-activated nodes; and (c) boosted preemptive influence maximization (BPIM) aims to select k seeds that are guaranteed to be activated and can reach the most number of nodes before other self-activated nodes. We propose scalable algorithms for all three problems and prove that they achieve 1 āˆ’ 1/eāˆ’ \epsilon approximation for BIM and BPIM and 1 āˆ’ \epsilon for PIM, for any \epsilon> 0. Through extensive tests on real-world graphs, we demonstrate that our algorithms outperform the baseline algorithms significantly for the PIM problem in solution quality, and also outperform the baselines for BIM and BPIM when self-activation behaviors are nonuniform across nodes.}, url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/influence-maximization-with-spontaneous-user-adoption/}, }