Motif-oriented influence maximization for viral marketing in large-scale social networks

The influence maximization (IM) problem aims to identify a budgeted set of nodes with the highest potential to influence the largest number of users in a cascade model, a key challenge in viral marketing. Traditional \emph{IM} approaches consider each user/node independently as a potential target customer. However, in many scenarios, the target customers comprise motifs, where activating only one or a few users within a motif is insufficient for effective viral marketing, which, nevertheless, receives little attention. For instance, if a motif of three friends planning to dine together, targeting all three simultaneously is crucial for a restaurant advertisement to succeed.In this paper, we address the motif-oriented influence maximization problem under the linear threshold model. We prove that the motif-oriented IM problem is NP-hard and that the influence function is neither supermodular nor submodular, in contrast to the classical \emph{IM} setting.To simplify the problem, we establish the submodular upper and lower bounds for the influence function. By leveraging the submodular property, we propose a natural greedy strategy that simultaneously maximizes both bounds. Our algorithm has an approximation ratio of $\tau\cdot (1-1/e-\varepsilon)$ and a near-linear time complexity of $O((k+l)(m+\eta)\log \eta/\varepsilon^2)$.Experimental results on diverse datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach in motif maximization.