A New Discrete Grid-Based Bacterial Foraging Optimizer to Solve Complex Influence Maximization of Social Networks

Influence maximization (IM) is fundamental to social network applications. It aims to find multiple seed nodes with an enormous impact cascade to maximize these nodes’ spread of influence in social networks. Traditional methods for solving influence maximization of the social network, such as the distance method, greedy method, and PageRank method, may suffer from issues of low calculation accuracy and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a new bacterial foraging optimization algorithm to solve the IM problem based on the complete-three-layer-influence (CTLI) evaluation model. In this algorithm, a novel grid-based reproduction strategy and a direction-adjustment-based chemotaxis strategy are devised to enhance the algorithm’s searchability. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on four social network cases to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm effectively solves the social network’s influence maximization.