Towards an Efficient Weighted Random Walk Domination

In this paper, we propose and study a new problem called the weighted random walk domination. Given a weighted graphG(V, E) and a budget B of the weighted random walk, it aims to find a k-size set S, which can minimize the total costs of the remaining nodes to access S through the weighted random walk, which is bounded by B. This problem is critical to a range of real-world applications, such as advertising in social networks and telecommunication base station selection in wireless sensor networks. We first present a dynamic programming based greedy method (DpSel) as a baseline. DpSel is time-consuming when |V| is huge. Thus, to overcome this drawback, we propose a matrix-based greedy method (MatrixSel), which can reduce the computation cost greatly. To further accelerate MatrixSel, we propose a BoundSel approach to reduce the number of the gain computations in each candidate selection by proactively estimating the upper bound of the marginal gain of the candidate node. Notably, all methods can achieve an approximation ratio of (1 - 1/e). Experiments on real datasets have been conducted to verify the efficiency, effectiveness, memory consumption and scalability of our methods.