StratLearner: Learning a Strategy for Misinformation Prevention in Social Networks

Given a combinatorial optimization problem taking an input, can we learn a strategy to solve it from the examples of input-solution pairs without knowing its objective function? In this paper, we consider such a setting and study the misinformation prevention problem. Given the examples of attacker-protector pairs, our goal is to learn a strategy to compute protectors against future attackers, without the need of knowing the underlying diffusion model. To this end, we design a structured prediction framework, where the main idea is to parameterize the scoring function using random features constructed through distance functions on randomly sampled subgraphs, which leads to a kernelized scoring function with weights learnable via the large margin method. Evidenced by experiments, our method can produce near-optimal protectors without using any information about the diffusion model, and it outperforms other possible graph-based and learning-based methods by an evident margin.