Evolutionary Computation in Social Propagation over Complex Networks: A Survey

Social propagation denotes the spread phenomena directly correlated to the human world and society, which includes but is not limited to the diffusion of human epidemics, human-made malicious viruses, fake news, social innovation, viral marketing, etc. Simulation and optimization are two major themes in social propagation, where network-based simulation helps to analyze and understand the social contagion, and problem-oriented optimization is devoted to contain or improve the infection results. Though there have been many models and optimization techniques, the matter of concern is that the increasing complexity and scales of propagation processes continuously refresh the former conclusions. Recently, evolutionary computation (EC) shows its potential in alleviating the concerns by introducing an evolving and developing perspective. With this insight, this paper intends to develop a comprehensive view of how EC takes effect in social propagation. Taxonomy is provided for classifying the propagation problems, and the applications of EC in solving these problems are reviewed. Furthermore, some open issues of social propagation and the potential applications of EC are discussed. This paper contributes to recognizing the problems in application-oriented EC design and paves the way for the development of evolving propagation dynamics.