A Review on Influence Dissemination in Social Networks

Influence dissemination research is a key issue in information dissemination in social networks. Due to the practical significance of influence analysis in marketing, advertising, personalized recommendation, and public opinion monitoring, researchers have investigated the problem from different perspectives and proposed solutions. In this paper, we review the influence propagation in social networks and conclude that the existing research uses three main approaches, network topology analysis, greedy algorithms, and heuristic algorithms. Also, according to the purpose of the research, we divided the existing literature into three categories, individual influence analysis, community mining, and influence maximization. Finally, based on state-of-the-art research, we unveil current weaknesses and future research directions.