Study on Information Diffusion Analysis in Social Networks and Its Applications

Due to the prevalence of social network services, more and more attentions are paid to explore how information diffuses and users affect each other in these networks, which has a wide range of applications, such as viral marketing, reposting prediction and social recommendation. Therefore, in this paper, we review the recent advances on information diffusion analysis in social networks and its applications. Specifically, we first shed light on several popular models to describe the information diffusion process in social networks, which enables three practical applications, i.e., influence evaluation, influence maximization and information source detection. Then, we discuss how to evaluate the authority and influence based on network structures. After that, current solutions to influence maximization and information source detection are discussed in detail, respectively. Finally, some possible research directions of information diffusion analysis are listed for further study.