Overlapping community-based fair influence maximization in social networks under open-source development model algorithm

The aim of Influence Maximization (IM) in social networks is to identify an optimal subset of users to maximize the spread of influence across the network. Fair Influence Maximization (FIM) develops the IM problem with the aim of equitable distribution of influence across communities and enhancing the fair propagation of information. Among the solutions for FIM, community-based techniques enhance performance by effectively capturing the structural properties and ensuring a more equitable influence spread. However, these techniques often ignore the overlapping nature of communities and suffer from a trade-off between complexity and fairness. With this motivation, this study handles the FIM based on Overlapping Community detection under optimization algorithms (FIMOC). FIMOC includes an overlapping community detection approach that can consider the importance of influential overlapping nodes in communities. Meanwhile, FIMOC uses a non-overlapping and overlapping node selection module based on communities to identify potential candidate nodes. Subsequently, FIMOC uses the Open-Source Development Model Algorithm (ODMA) as an optimization algorithm to identify the set of influential nodes. Our method considers the dynamic and overlapping nature of social communities, ensuring that the influence spread is not only maximized but also equitably distributed across diverse groups. By leveraging real‐world social networks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments. The results show that our method achieves a more balanced influence spread, providing a fairer solution, while also enhancing the overall reach of information dissemination.