NEDRL-CIM:Network Embedding Meets Deep Reinforcement Learning to Tackle Competitive Influence Maximization on Evolving Social Networks

Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM) aims to maximize the influence of a party given the competition from other parties in the same social network, like companies find key users to promote their competitive products on the social network to achieve maximum profit. Recently, learning-based solutions are introduced to tackle the competitive influence maximization problem. However, such studies focus on the static nature of social networks. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based framework employing network embedding, termed as DRL-EMB, to tackle the CIM problem on evolving social networks. The DRL-EMB key objective is to find the best strategy to maximize the party’s reward, considering budget and competition with information propagation and network evolving being run in parallel. We validate our proposed framework with the DRL-based model using hand-crafted state features (DRL-HCF) and heuristic-based methods. Experimental results show that our proposed framework, DRL-EMB, achieves better results than heuristic-based and DRL-HCF models while significantly outperforming the DRL-HCF model in terms of time efficiency.