The influence maximization paradigm has been used by researchers in various fields in order to study how information spreads in social networks. While previously the attention was mostly on efficiency, more recently fairness issues have been taken into account in this scope. In this paper, we propose to use randomization as a mean for achieving fairness. Similar to previous works like Fish et al. (WWW '19) and Tsang et al. (IJCAI '19), we study the maximin criterion for (group) fairness. In contrast to their work however, we model the problem in such a way that, when choosing the seed sets, probabilistic strategies are possible rather than only deterministic ones. We introduce two different variants of this probabilistic problem, one that entails probabilistic strategies over nodes (node-based problem) and a second one that entails probabilistic strategies over sets of nodes (set-based problem). While the original deterministic problem involving the maximin criterion has been shown to be inapproximable, interestingly, we show that both probabilistic variants permit approximation algorithms that achieve a constant multiplicative factor of 1-1/e plus an additive arbitrarily small error that is due to the simulation of the information spread. For an experimental study, we provide implementations of multiplicative-weight routines for both problems and compare the achieved fairness values to existing methods. Maybe non-surprisingly, we show that the ex-ante values of the computed probabilistic strategies are significantly larger than the (ex-post) fairness values of previous methods. This indicates that studying fairness via randomization is a worthwhile path to follow. Interestingly and maybe more surprisingly, we observe that even the ex-post fairness values computed by our routines, dominate over the fairness achieved by previous methods on most of the instances tested.
Influence maximization is a widely used model for information dissemination in social networks. Recent work has employed such interventions across a wide range of social problems, spanning public health, substance abuse, and international development (to name a few examples). A critical but understudied question is whether the benefits of such interventions are fairly distributed across different groups in the population; e.g., avoiding discrimination with respect to sensitive attributes such as race or gender. Drawing on legal and game-theoretic concepts, we introduce formal definitions of fa…
Modeling and shaping how information spreads through a network is a major research topic in network analysis. While initially the focus has been mostly on efficiency, recently fairness criteria have been taken into account in this setting. Most work has focused on the maximin criteria however, and thus still different groups can receive very different shares of information. In this work we propose to consider fairness as a notion to be guaranteed by an algorithm rather than as a criterion to be maximized. To this end, we propose three optimization problems that aim at maximizing the overall sp…
Influence maximization has found applications in a wide range of real-world problems, for instance, viral marketing of products in an online social network, and information propagation of valuable information such as job vacancy advertisements and health-related information. While existing algorithmic techniques usually aim at maximizing the total number of people influenced, the population often comprises several socially salient groups, e.g., based on gender or race. As a result, these techniques could lead to disparity across different groups in receiving important information. Furthermore,…
We address the problem of linear precoder (beamformer) design in a multiple-input multiple-output interference channel (MIMO-IC). The aim is to design the transmit covariance matrices in order to achieve max-min utility fairness for all users. The corresponding optimization problem is non-convex and NP-hard in general. We devise an efficient algorithm based on the minorization-maximization (MM) technique to obtain quality solutions to this problem. The proposed method solves a second-order cone convex program (SOCP) at each iteration. We prove that the devised method converges to stationary po…
Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have traditionally been illustrated experimentally via simple games like the dictator and ultimatum games. Experiments with these games suggest that, beyond rational economic thinking, human decision-making processes are influenced by social preferences, such as an inclination to fairness. In this study we suggest that the apparent gap between competitive and altruistic huma…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；RAND Corporation（兰德公司）
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization techniques have been proposed to aid with the choice of "peer leaders" or "influencers" in such interventions. Yet, traditional algorithms for influence maximization have not been designed with these interventions in mind. As a result, they may disproportionately exclude minority communities from the benefits of the intervention. This has motivated research on…
Fairness in influence maximization has been a very active research topic recently. Most works in this context study the question of how to find seeding strategies (deterministic or probabilistic) such that nodes or communities in the network get their fair share of coverage. Different fairness criteria have been used in this context. All these works assume that the entity that is spreading the information has an inherent interest in spreading the information fairly, otherwise why would they want to use the developed fair algorithms? This assumption may however be flawed in reality -- the sprea…
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Max Planck Institute for Human Development（马克斯·普朗克人类发展研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of California Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
The potential for machine learning systems to amplify social inequities and unfairness is receiving increasing popular and academic attention. Much recent work has focused on developing algorithmic tools to assess and mitigate such unfairness. However, there is little work on enhancing fairness in graph algorithms. Here, we develop a simple, effective and general method, CrossWalk, that enhances fairness of various graph algorithms, including influence maximization, link prediction and node classification, applied to node embeddings. CrossWalk is applicable to any random walk based node repres…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；MPI for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
A typical viral marketing model identifies influential users in a social network to maximize a single product adoption assuming unlimited user attention, campaign budgets, and time. In reality, multiple products need campaigns, users have limited attention, convincing users incurs costs, and advertisers have limited budgets and expect the adoptions to be maximized soon. Facing these user, monetary, and timing constraints, we formulate the problem as a submodular maximization task in a continuous-time diffusion model under the intersection of a matroid and multiple knapsack constraints. We prop…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）；Max Planck Institute for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Influence maximization is a widely studied topic in network science, where the aim is to reach the maximum possible number of nodes, while only targeting a small initial set of individuals. It has critical applications in many fields, including viral marketing, information propagation, news dissemination, and vaccinations. However, the objective does not usually take into account whether the final set of influenced nodes is fair with respect to sensitive attributes, such as race or gender. Here we address fair influence maximization, aiming to reach minorities more equitably. We introduce Adve…
