Influence Maximization in Trajectory Databases

We study a novel problem of influence maximization in trajectory databases that is very useful in precise locationaware advertising. It finds k best trajectories to be attached with a given advertisement and maximizes the expected influence among a large group of audience. We show that the problem is NP-hard and propose both exact and approximate solutions to find the best set of trajectories. We also extend our problem to support the scenario when there are a group of advertisements. We validate our approach via extensive experiments with real datasets.