  Understanding the behaviors of information propagation is essential for the
effective exploitation of social influence in social networks. However, few
existing influence models are tractable and efficient for describing the
information propagation process, especially when dealing with the difficulty of
incorporating the effects of combined influences from multiple nodes. To this
end, in this paper, we provide a social influence model that alleviates this
obstacle based on electrical circuit theory. This model vastly improves the
efficiency of measuring the influence strength between any pair of nodes, and
can be used to interpret the real-world influence propagation process in a
coherent way. In addition, this circuit theory model provides a natural
solution to the social influence maximization problem. When applied to
realworld data, the circuit theory model consistently outperforms the
state-of-the-art methods and can greatly alleviate the computation burden of
the influence maximization problem.
