  Research issues and data mining techniques for product recommendation and
viral marketing have been widely studied. Existing works on seed selection in
social networks do not take into account the effect of product recommendations
in e-commerce stores. In this paper, we investigate the seed selection problem
for viral marketing that considers both effects of social influence and item
inference (for product recommendation). We develop a new model, Social Item
Graph (SIG), that captures both effects in form of hyperedges. Accordingly, we
formulate a seed selection problem, called Social Item Maximization Problem
(SIMP), and prove the hardness of SIMP. We design an efficient algorithm with
performance guarantee, called Hyperedge-Aware Greedy (HAG), for SIMP and
develop a new index structure, called SIG-index, to accelerate the computation
of diffusion process in HAG. Moreover, to construct realistic SIG models for
SIMP, we develop a statistical inference based framework to learn the weights
of hyperedges from data. Finally, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on our
proposals with various baselines. Experimental result validates our ideas and
demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and
algorithms over baselines.
