Learnability of Competitive Threshold Models

Learnability of Competitive Threshold Models

Yifan Wang, Guangmo Tong

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3985-3991. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/553

Modeling the spread of social contagions is central to various applications in social computing. In this paper, we study the learnability of the competitive threshold model from a theoretical perspective. We demonstrate how competitive threshold models can be seamlessly simulated by artificial neural networks with finite VC dimensions, which enables analytical sample complexity and generalization bounds. Based on the proposed hypothesis space, we design efficient algorithms under the empirical risk minimization scheme. The theoretical insights are finally translated into practical and explainable modeling methods, the effectiveness of which is verified through a sanity check over a few synthetic and real datasets. The experimental results promisingly show that our method enjoys a decent performance without using excessive data points, outperforming off-the-shelf methods.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Web and Social Networks
Data Mining: Mining Graphs
Data Mining: Theoretical Foundations of Data Mining
Machine Learning: Learning Theory
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Social Sciences