DeepPM: A Deep Learning-based Profit Maximization Approach in Social Networks
Poonam Sharma, Suman Banerjee
TL;DR
The paper tackles profit maximization in social networks under budget constraints by selecting seed users without assuming a fixed diffusion model. It introduces DeepPM, a learning-based framework that uses a teacher–student diffusion setup, a graph-convolutional surrogate to predict calibrated activation probabilities, and an autoencoder to parameterize seed patterns, enabling gradient-based seed optimization under a budget. The approach is trained with a differentiable surrogate for profit and evaluated on real-world datasets against multiple baselines, demonstrating superior profit and competitive seed-set sizes, albeit with higher computation due to training and cascade simulations. The work offers a diffusion-model-agnostic, data-driven method for viral marketing that can adapt to complex diffusion dynamics and practical budgeting constraints, with public code provided for reproducibility.
Abstract
The problem of Profit Maximization asks to choose a limited number of influential users from a given social network such that the initial activation of these users maximizes the profit earned at the end of the diffusion process. This problem has a direct impact on viral marketing in social networks. Over the past decade, several traditional methodologies (i.e., non-learning-based, which include approximate solution, heuristic solution, etc.) have been developed, and many of them produce promising results. All these methods require the information diffusion model as input. However, it may not be realistic to consider any particular diffusion model as real-world diffusion scenarios will be much more complex and need not follow the rules for any particular diffusion model. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based framework to solve the profit maximization problem. Our model makes a latent representation of the seed sets and is able to learn the diversified information diffusion pattern. We also design a noble objective function that can be optimized effectively using the proposed learning-based approach. The proposed model has been evaluated with the real-world datasets, and the results are reported. We compare the effectiveness of the proposed approach with many existing methods and observe that the seed set chosen by the proposed learning-based approach leads to more profit compared to existing methods. The whole implementation and the simulation code is available at: https://github.com/PoonamSharma-PY/DeepPM.