In many social networks, besides peer-to-peer communication, people share information via groups. An interesting problem arises in this scenario: for such networks, which are the best groups to start information diffusion so that the number of eventually informed nodes can be maximized? In this study, we formulate a novel information coverage maximization problem in the context of hypergraphs, wherein nodes are connected by arbitrary-size hyperedges (i.e., groups). In contrast to the existing literature on influence maximization, which aims to find authority nodes with high influence, we are interested in identifying the key groups. To address this problem, we present a new information diffusion model for hypergraphs, namely HypergraphIndependent-Cascade (HIC). HIC generalizes the popular independent cascade model to hypergraphs to allow capturing group-level information diffusion. We prove the NP-hardness of the proposed problem under HIC, and the submodular monotone property of the information coverage function. Further, inspired by the Degree Discount algorithm, we derive a new heuristic method named Influence Discount (InfDis). Extensive experiments provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
Part of ISBN 9781611977653
QC 20240718