A Community Related Influence Evaluation Model for Social Networks with a Dynamic Perspective

The nature of free information diffusion and sharing in social networks (SNs) has increasingly attracted users to gather in communities to facilitate communication, resulting in increased challenges to community influence analysis in SNs. In SNs, the ability to evaluate how a community affects other users and communities is essential for further applications. Although considerable effort has been expended on the influence evaluation of individuals, little attention has been paid to influence evaluation of the community as a whole—particularly when considering the inherent features of dynamic changes of influence over time. This paper proposes a community related influence evaluation model with a dynamic perspective (D-CIEM) that reflects two types of influence, entity influence and community-initiated influence, by considering dynamic effects over time. Our work includes the following main points: first, we address the framework of D-CIEM and its related formal definitions; then, we propose dynamic entity influence evaluation in D-CIEM, i.e., user influence and community influence evaluation with dynamic factors. We present community-initiated dynamic influence evaluation methods, including methods to calculate community influence for internal and external users and for other communities. Finally, we provide evaluation results to verify the performance of our model.