Limiting Concept Spread in Environments with Interacting Concepts

The propagation of concepts in a population of agents is a form of influence spread, which can be modelled as a cascade from an initial set of individuals. In real-world environments there may be many concepts spreading and interacting. Previous work does not consider utilising concept interactions to limit the spread of a concept. In this paper we present a method for limiting concept spread, in environments where concepts interact and do not block others from spreading. We define a model that allows for the interactions between any number of concepts to be represented and, using this model, develop a solution to the influence limitation problem, which aims to minimise the spread of a target concept through the use of a secondary inhibiting concept. We present a heuristic, called maximum probable gain, and compare its performance to established heuristics for manipulating influence spread in both simulated smallworld networks and real-world networks. CCS Concepts •Computing methodologies → Multi-agent systems;