Identifying influential nodes that can jointly trigger the maximum influence spread in networks is a fundamental problem in many applications such as viral marketing, online advertising, and disease control. Most existing studies assume that social influence is static and they fail to capture the dynamics of influence in reality. In this work, we address the dynamic influence challenge by designing efficient streaming methods that can identify influential nodes from highly dynamic node interaction streams. We first propose a general time-decaying dynamic interaction network (TDN) model to model node interaction streams with the ability to smoothly discard outdated data. Based on the TDN model, we design three algorithms, i.e., SieveADN, BasicReduction, and HistApprox. SieveADN identifies influential nodes from a special kind of TDNs with efficiency. BasicReduction uses SieveADN as a basic building block to identify influential nodes from general TDNs. HistApprox significantly improves the efficiency of BasicReduction. More importantly, we theoretically show that all three algorithms enjoy constant factor approximation guarantees. Experiments conducted on various real interaction datasets demonstrate that our approach finds near-optimal solutions with speed at least @math to @math times faster than baseline methods.
We formalize the problem of maintaining time-decaying aggregates and statistics of a data stream: the relative contribution of each data item to the aggregate is scaled down by a factor that depends on, and is non-increasing with, elapsed time. Time-decaying aggregates are used in applications where the significance of data items decreases over time. We develop storage-efficient algorithms, and establish upper and lower bounds. Surprisingly, even though maintaining decaying aggregates have become a widely-used tool, our work seems to be the first both to explore it formally and to provide storage-efficient algorithms for important families of decay functions, including polynomial decay. We present a new sketch for summarizing network data. The sketch has the following properties which make it useful in communication-efficient aggregation in distributed streaming scenarios, such as sensor networks: the sketch is duplicate insensitive, i.e., reinsertions of the same data will not affect the sketch and hence the estimates of aggregates. Unlike previous duplicate-insensitive sketches for sensor data aggregation [S. , Synposis diffusion for robust aggregation in sensor networks, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems, (2004), pp. 250-262], [J. , Approximate aggregation techniques for sensor databases, in Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2004, pp. 449-460], it is also time decaying, so that the weight of a data item in the sketch can decrease with time according to a user-specified decay function. The sketch can give provably approximate guarantees for various aggregates of data, including the sum, median, quantiles, and frequent elements. The size of the sketch and the time taken to update it are both polylogarithmic in the size of the relevant data. Further, multiple sketches computed over distributed data can be combined without loss of accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first sketch that combines all the above properties. We consider the problem of maintaining aggregates and statistics over data streams, with respect to the last N data elements seen so far. We refer to this model as the sliding window model. We consider the following basic problem: Given a stream of bits, maintain a count of the number of 1's in the last N elements seen from the stream. We show that, using @math bits of memory, we can estimate the number of 1's to within a factor of @math . We also give a matching lower bound of @math memory bits for any deterministic or randomized algorithms. We extend our scheme to maintain the sum of the last N positive integers and provide matching upper and lower bounds for this more general problem as well. We also show how to efficiently compute the Lp norms ( @math ) of vectors in the sliding window model using our techniques. Using our algorithm, one can adapt many other techniques to work for the sliding window model with a multiplicative overhead of @math in memory and a @math factor loss in accuracy. These include maintaining approximate histograms, hash tables, and statistics or aggregates such as sum and averages.