Large-scale multi-objective influence maximisation with network downscaling

Finding the most influential nodes in a network is a computationally hard problem with several possible applications in various kinds of network-based problems. While several methods have been proposed for tackling the influence maximisation (IM) problem, their runtime typically scales poorly when the network size increases. Here, we propose an original method, based on network downscaling, that allows a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) to solve the IM problem on a reduced scale network, while preserving the relevant properties of the original network. The downscaled solution is then upscaled to the original network, using a mechanism based on centrality metrics such as PageRank. Our results on eight large networks (including two with ~50k nodes) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with a more than 10-fold runtime gain compared to the time needed on the original network, and an up to 82% time reduction compared to CELF.