Competition-Based Benchmarking of Influence Ranking Methods in Social Networks

Abstract

The development of new methods to identify influential spreaders in complex networks has been a significant challenge in network science over the last decade. Practical significance spans from graph theory to interdisciplinary fields like biology, sociology, economics, and marketing. Despite rich literature in this direction, we find small notable effort to consistently compare and rank existing centralities considering both the topology and the opinion diffusion model, as well as considering the context of simultaneous spreading. To this end, our study introduces a new benchmarking framework targeting the scenario of competitive opinion diffusion; our method differs from classic SIR epidemic diffusion, by employing competition-based spreading supported by the realistic tolerance-based diffusion model. We review a wide range of state-of-the-art node ranking methods and apply our novel method on large synthetic and real-world datasets. Simulations show that our methodology offers much higher quantitative differentiation between ranking methods on the same dataset and notably high granularity for a ranking method over different datasets. We are able to pinpoint—with consistency—which influence the ranking method performs better against the other one, on a given complex network topology. We consider that our framework can offer a forward leap when analysing diffusion characterized by real-time competition between agents. These results can greatly benefit the tackling of social unrest, rumour spreading, political manipulation, and other vital and challenging applications in social network analysis.