Computational models for social influence analysis: [extended abstract]

Jie Tang, Jimeng Sun

Abstract: Social influence occurs when one's opinions, emotions, or behaviors are affected by others, intentionally or unintentionally. In this article, we survey recent research progress on social influence analysis. In particular, we first give a brief overview of related background knowledge, and then discuss what is social influence. We try to answer this question in terms of homophily and the process of influence and selection. After that, we focus on describing computational models for social influence including models for influence probability learning and influence diffusion. Finally, we discuss potential applications of social influence.