  Social and information networking activities such as on Facebook, Twitter,
WeChat, and Weibo have become an indispensable part of our everyday life, where
we can easily access friends' behaviors and are in turn influenced by them.
Consequently, an effective social influence prediction for each user is
critical for a variety of applications such as online recommendation and
advertising.
  Conventional social influence prediction approaches typically design various
hand-crafted rules to extract user- and network-specific features. However,
their effectiveness heavily relies on the knowledge of domain experts. As a
result, it is usually difficult to generalize them into different domains.
Inspired by the recent success of deep neural networks in a wide range of
computing applications, we design an end-to-end framework, DeepInf, to learn
users' latent feature representation for predicting social influence. In
general, DeepInf takes a user's local network as the input to a graph neural
network for learning her latent social representation. We design strategies to
incorporate both network structures and user-specific features into
convolutional neural and attention networks. Extensive experiments on Open
Academic Graph, Twitter, Weibo, and Digg, representing different types of
social and information networks, demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end
model, DeepInf, significantly outperforms traditional feature engineering-based
approaches, suggesting the effectiveness of representation learning for social
applications.
