On the Group-Fairness-Aware Influence Maximization in Social Networks

The goal of influence maximization (IM) is to find a set of k nodes that maximize their influence spread over a social network. IM is a widely used model for information propagation in social networks. Although IM has been widely investigated in recent years, the fair propagation of information is still understudied. In this article, we consider the group-fairness-aware IM, where the objective is to ensure that information has been fairly distributed across different groups in the population. We extend the notion of group fairness in IM, introduced by Tsang et al., by considering the speed of information propagation in different groups of a social network and formulating it as a new group-fairness metric. We propose a multiobjective metaheuristic (SetMOGWO), based on the multiobjective gray wolf optimizer, to improve the fair propagation of information in IM concerning various fairness metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous work with respect to all introduced fairness metrics. We also carry out detailed experimental analyses on real-world networks and report interesting relationships between fairness concepts and network characteristics, including the price of ensuring fairness in social networks, the effect of social groups' structure on fairness, and the dependence among fairness metrics. Especially, we show that traditional IM techniques often neglect smaller groups. On the other hand, we show that, with a low cost, it can be ensured that these groups receive a fair portion of resources in fair order.