Learning a Social Network by Influencing Opinions

Title : Learning a Social Network by Influencing Opinions
Speaker : Luisa Fernanda Estrada Plata (Mathsys, Warwick)
We study a campaigner who wants to learn the structure of a social network by observing the underlying diffusion process and intervening on it. Using synchronous majoritarian updates on binary opinions as the underlying dynamics, we offer upper bounds on the campaigner's budget for learning any network with certainty, considering both observation and intervention resources, and further improving them for the case of clique networks. Additionally, we investigate the learning progress of the campaigner when her budget falls below these upper bounds. For such cases, we design a greedy campaigning strategy aimed at optimising the campaigner's information gain at each opinion diffusion step.