Learning Multiple Network Embeddings for Social Influence Prediction

Abstract How to effectively predict social influence is an essential issue in social network analysis. Almost all reported methods for social influence prediction are mainly concerned with estimating influence probabilities for each linking edge. However, all of this past work cannot accurately predict influence probabilities for all edges due to the problem of data sparsity. Unlike conventional approaches, this work focuses on exploring a cross problem for multiple network embeddings and social influence prediction. This study developed a new end-to-end approach, Multi-Influor, that learns multiple influence vectors for each user in social networks, instead of estimating influence probabilities for each edge. The multiple network embeddings consider multi-dimensional influence factors that incorporate pairwise node interactions, network structures, and global similarity comparisons. Moreover, this study solves the problem of influence evaluation caused by sparse observations. Extensive comparisons based on large-scale datasets indicate that the Multi-Influor approach outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines, and the experimental results demonstrate that the Multi-Influor approach is more practical on real-world social networks.