Social network node pricing based on graph autoencoder in data marketplaces

Data have become a valuable digital resource. It has in turn precipitated the emergence of big data marketplaces. For social network date in the marketplaces, each node should be priced according to its influence. The key challenge is that deep learning based pricing models require initial cascade graphs as inputs to predict influence, which cannot be obtained while pricing nodes. Furthermore, node pricing must enhance purchase intentions while being consistent with their influence. To address these challenges, a node-pricing framework is proposed, in which market price is determined based on the predicted influence. In this framework, corrections are performed by using a graph autoencoder (GAE). The corrections are used to augment the neighborhood subgraph and facilitate the extraction of valid sequence features, which are then used to predict influence. An approximate Shapley value for node influence is used to evaluate the price of the nodes. A multi-perspective pricing approach is further investigated, where consumer utility and the approximate Shapley value for influence are the objectives. An inflection point is chosen on the Pareto frontier to select a price that enhances consumer utility. Extensive experiments were conducted on two real-world social network datasets. The results indicate that our performance is higher than DeepCas by 10.38% in Twitter and 9.64% in Weibo. The price output by our framework is consistent with the nodes’ social marketing value while maximizing consumer utility.