Competition-Based Benchmarking of Influence Ranking Methods in Social Networks

Figure 2

Example of the alternate opinion assigning approach in order to offer both competing ranking methods even chances of propagation. The coloured nodes marked with indices 1–5 represent the top 5 orange, respectively, blue spreaders, as determined by the two ranking methods. Moreover, some of these spreaders overlap ((a) e.g., 3/5 means 3rd best orange spreader and 5th best blue spreader), so we assign each spreader node one of two opinions (orange/blue) alternatively, starting with orange first (b) then blue first (c). As such, a simulation of orange versus blue ranking methods translates into two independent simulations, slightly favouring each method in turn. The assigning of opinion is always evenly distributed in terms of number of nodes, for example, 3 spreaders in this example.