Sample location selection for efficient distance-aware influence maximization in geo-social networks

In geo-social networks, the distances of users to a location play an important role in populating the business or campaign at the location. Thereby, the problem of Distance-Aware Influence Maximization (DAIM) has been investigated recently. The efficiency of DAIM computation heavily relies on the sample location selection, because the online seeding performance is sensitive to the distance between sample location and promoted location, and the offline precomputation performance is sensitive to the number of samples. However, there is no work to fully study the problem of sample location selection w.r.t. DAIM in geo-social networks. To do this, we first formalize the problem under a reasonable assumption that a promoted location always adheres to the distribution of users. Then, we propose an efficient location sampling approach based on the heuristic anchor point selection and facility allocation techniques. Our experimental results on two real datasets demonstrate that our approach can improve the online and offline efficiency of DAIM approach like [9] by orders of magnitude.