{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/stop-and-stare-optimal-sampling-algorithms","title":"Stop-and-Stare: Optimal Sampling Algorithms for Viral Marketing in Billion-scale Networks","arxiv_id":"1605.07990","date":"2016-05-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hung T. Nguyen","My T. Thai","Thang N. Dinh"],"abstract":"Influence Maximization (IM), that seeks a small set of key users who spread the influence widely into the network, is a core problem in multiple domains. It finds applications in viral marketing, epidemic control, and assessing cascading failures within complex systems. Despite the huge amount of effort, IM in billion-scale networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and World Wide Web has not been satisfactorily solved. Even the state-of-the-art methods such as TIM+ and IMM may take days on those networks. In this paper, we propose SSA and D-SSA, two novel sampling frameworks for IM-based viral marketing problems. SSA and D-SSA are up to 1200 times faster than the SIGMOD'15 best method, IMM, while providing the same $(1-1/e-\\epsilon)$ approximation guarantee. Underlying our frameworks is an innovative Stop-and-Stare strategy in which they stop at exponential check points to verify (stare) if there is adequate statistical evidence on the solution quality. Theoretically, we prove that SSA and D-SSA are the first approximation algorithms that use (asymptotically) minimum numbers of samples, meeting strict theoretical thresholds characterized for IM. The absolute superiority of SSA and D-SSA are confirmed through extensive experiments on real network data for IM and another topic-aware viral marketing problem, named TVM. The source code is available at https://github.com/hungnt55/Stop-and-Stare","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07990v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.07990v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"stop-and-stare-optimal-sampling-algorithms","repo_url":"https://github.com/hungnt55/Stop-and-Stare","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}},{"paper_slug":"stop-and-stare-optimal-sampling-algorithms","repo_url":"https://github.com/smaniu/oim","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1605.07990","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}