Efficient social link structure Analysis to find top k influential Nodes

Abstract

Finding the influential nodes is one of the most discussed research newlineproblem recently in the area of social science This problem has significant newlineapplications in the field of marketing finding prolific authors in a research newlinedomain politics economics epidemiology sociology computer networking newlinedatabases and so on The principal focus of this research work is to identify newlineinfluential nodes in social collaboration and citation networks that capture newlinesocial relationships ties among individuals nodes with varying degree of newlineintensity Influential nodes are capable of exerting strong influence on other newlinenodes of the network and thus can be utilized to maximize the influence newlinespread in a society with reduced cost and effort This thesis contains analysis newlineof the various solution spaces and also provides novel solutions for locating newlinesuch influential nodes Game theoretic approach provides a rich mathematical framework newlinefor analyzing interactions among individuals in the social networks The study newlineof dynamics of players individuals where players work in unison to attain a newlinecommon goal are in cooperative games A novel approach based on Shapley newlinevalue solution space of cooperative game theory is proposed in this newlinedissertation to locate influential nodes in the social networks The proposed newlineapproach thrives to reduce the computational complexity of the state of art newlinegame theoretic algorithms by considering the small world characteristics newlineinherent in the social networks Weak ties bridge nodes and high clustering newlinecoefficient are the two specific small world properties which are dealt with in newlinethis thesis High clustering coefficient indicates presence of communities and newlinethe weak ties play a vital role in spreading information because they tend to newlineconnect otherwise it disconnects the communities newline newline