Influence maximization in complex social networks based on community structure

Many real-world networks, including biological networks, internet, information and social networks can be modeled by a complex network consisting of a large number of elements connected to each other. One of the important issues in complex networks is the evaluation of node importance because of its wide usage and great theoretical significance, such as in information diffusion, control of disease spreading, viral marketing and rumor dynamics. A fundamental issue is to identify a set of most influential individuals who would maximize the influence spread of the network. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for identifying influential nodes in complex networks with community structure without having to determine the number of seed nodes based on genetic algorithm. The proposed algorithm can identify influential nodes with three methods at each stage (degree centrality, random and structural hole) in each community and measure the spread of influence again at each stage. This process continues until the end of the genetic algorithm, and at the last stage, the most influential nodes are identified with maximum diffusion in each community. Our community-based influencers detection approach enables us to find more influential nodes than those suggested by page-rank and other centrality measures. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm does not require determining the number of k initial active nodes.