Influence maximization over a network : static and dynamic policies

The problem of maximizing the spread of an opinion inside a social network has been investigated extensively during the past decade. The importance of this problem in applications such as marketing has been amplified by the major expansion of online social networks. In this thesis, we study opinion control policies, first under a broad class of deterministic dynamics governing the interactions inside a network, and then under the classical "Voter Model". In the former case, we design a policy that a controller can follow in order to spread an opinion inside a network with the smallest possible cost. In the latter case, we consider networks whose underlying graph is the d-dimensional integer torus Zd/n, and we design policies that minimize the expected time until the network reaches a consensus. We also show that, in dimension d >/= 2, dynamic policies do not perform significantly better than static policies, while, in dimension d = 1, optimal dynamic policies perform much better than optimal static policies..

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Ben Chaouch, Zied

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John N. Tsitsiklis.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107377

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/107377