Competition-Based Benchmarking of Influence Ranking Methods in Social Networks

Figure 1

Example of the incurred limitations when benchmarking a diffusion process only from a single opinion’s point of view, when the real-world context implies simultaneous diffusion and competition between multiple opinions. It is suggested that the orange diffusion time is shorter (better) than the blue time, due to the higher, more uniform dispersion of orange opinion sources. However, in reality (c), none of the two opinions may fully cover the network in optimal times or , nor will they achieve such high coverages as or , that is, and .

(a)

(b)

(c)