Adversarial Graph Embeddings for Fair Influence Maximization over Social Networks

Adversarial Graph Embeddings for Fair Influence Maximization over Social Networks

Moein Khajehnejad, Ahmad Asgharian Rezaei, Mahmoudreza Babaei, Jessica Hoffmann, Mahdi Jalili, Adrian Weller

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Special track on AI for CompSust and Human well-being. Pages 4306-4312. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/594

Influence maximization is a widely studied topic in network science, where the aim is to reach the maximum possible number of nodes, while only targeting a small initial set of individuals. It has critical applications in many fields, including viral marketing, information propagation, news dissemination, and vaccinations. However, the objective does not usually take into account whether the final set of influenced nodes is fair with respect to sensitive attributes, such as race or gender. Here we address fair influence maximization, aiming to reach minorities more equitably. We introduce Adversarial Graph Embeddings: we co-train an auto-encoder for graph embedding and a discriminator to discern sensitive attributes. This leads to embeddings which are similarly distributed across sensitive attributes. We then find a good initial set by clustering the embeddings. We believe we are the first to use embeddings for the task of fair influence maximization. While there are typically trade-offs between fairness and influence maximization objectives, our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach dramatically reduces disparity while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art influence maximization methods.
Keywords:
AI Ethics: Fairness
Machine Learning: Adversarial Machine Learning
Natural Language Processing: Embeddings
Machine Learning Applications: Networks