Influential users play an important role in online social networks since users tend to have an impact on one other. Therefore, the proposed work analyzes users and their behavior in order to identify influential users and predict user participation. Normally, the success of a social media site is dependent on the activity level of the participating users. For both online social networking sites and individual users, it is of interest to find out if a topic will be interesting or not. In this article, we propose association learning to detect relationships between users. In order to verify the findings, several experiments were executed based on social network analysis, in which the most influential users identified from association rule learning were compared to the results from Degree Centrality and Page Rank Centrality. The results clearly indicate that it is possible to identify the most influential users using association rule learning. In addition, the results also indicate a lower execution time compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Online social networks and social media analysis are popular research areas in contemporary network science. The main focus in social network research is on link prediction @cite_26 and social connection prediction @cite_24 . Different teams around the world also work on: (i) personality prediction for micro blog users @cite_23 , (ii) churn prediction and its influence on the network @cite_32 @cite_4 , (iii) community evolution prediction @cite_5 @cite_27 , (iv) using social media to predict real-world outcomes @cite_18 , (v) predicting friendship intensity @cite_10 @cite_12 , (vi) affiliation recommendations @cite_29 @cite_21 , and (vii) sentiment analysis and opinion mining @cite_1 .
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_12
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This paper intends to provide some insights of a scientific problem: how likely one's interests can be inferred from his her social connections -- friends, friends' friends, 3-degree friends, etc? Is "Birds of a Feather Flocks Together" a norm? We do not consider the friending activity on online social networking sites. Instead, we conduct this study by implementing a privacy-preserving large distribute social sensor system in a large global IT company to capture the multifaceted activities of 30,000+ people, including communications (e.g., emails, instant messaging, etc) and Web 2.0 activities (e.g., social bookmarking, file sharing, blogging, etc). These activities occupy the majority of employees' time in work, and thus, provide a high quality approximation to the real social connections of employees in the workplace context. In addition to such "informal networks", we investigated the "formal networks", such as their hierarchical structure, as well as the demographic profile data such as geography, job role, self-specified interests, etc. Because user ID matching across multiple sources on the Internet is very difficult, and most user activity logs have to be anonymized before they are processed, no prior studies could collect comparable multifaceted activity data of individuals. That makes this study unique. In this paper, we present a technique to predict the inference quality by utilizing (1) network analysis and network autocorrelation modeling of informal and formal networks, and (2) regression models to predict user interest inference quality from network characteristics. We verify our findings with experiments on both implicit user interests indicated by the content of communications or Web 2.0 activities, and explicit user interests specified in user profiles. We demonstrate that the inference quality prediction increases the inference quality of implicit interests by 42.8 , and inference quality of explicit interests by up to 101 . Online social networking sites have become increasingly popular over the last few years. As a result, new interdisciplinary research directions have emerged in which social network analysis methods are applied to networks containing hundreds millions of users. Unfortunately, links between individuals may be missing due to imperfect acquirement processes or because they are not yet reflected in the online network (i.e., friends in real world did not form a virtual connection.) Existing link prediction techniques lack the scalability required for full application on a continuously growing social network which may be adding everyday users with thousands of connections. The primary bottleneck in link prediction techniques is extracting structural features required for classifying links. In this paper we propose a set of simple, easy-to-compute structural features that can be analyzed to identify missing links. We show that a machine learning classifier trained using the proposed simple structural features can successfully identify missing links even when applied to a hard problem of classifying links between individuals who have at least one common friend. A new friends measure that we developed is shown to be a good predictor for missing links and an evaluation experiment was performed on five large social networks datasets: Face book, Flickr, You Tube, Academia and The Marker. Our methods can provide social network site operators with the capability of helping users to find known, offline contacts and to discover new friends online. They may also be used for exposing hidden links in an online social network. Online social networks have gained great success in recent years and many of them involve multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships. Among these relationships, social links among users are of great importance. Many existing link prediction methods focus on predicting social links that will appear in the future among all users based upon a snapshot of the social network. In real-world social networks, many new users are joining in the service every day. Predicting links for new users are more important. Different from conventional link prediction problems, link prediction for new users are more challenging due to the following reasons: (1) differences in information distributions between new users and the existing active users (i.e., old users); (2) lack of information from the new users in the network. We propose a link prediction method called SCAN-PS (Supervised Cross Aligned Networks link prediction with Personalized Sampling), to solve the link prediction problem for new users with information transferred from both the existing active users in the target network and other source networks through aligned accounts. We proposed a within-target-network personalized sampling method to process the existing active users' information in order to accommodate the differences in information distributions before the intra-network knowledge transfer. SCAN-PS can also exploit information in other source networks, where the user accounts are aligned with the target network. In this way, SCAN-PS could solve the cold start problem when information of these new users is total absent in the target network. Online social networks have gained great success in recent years. Some online social networks only involving users and social links among users can be represented as homogeneous networks. Meanwhile, some other social networks containing abundant information, which include multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships, can be denoted as heterogeneous networks. Predicting the missing links or links that will be formed in the future based on a snapshot of social networks is formally defined as the link prediction problem. Link prediction problems have extensive applications in real-world social networks and many concrete social services can be cast as link prediction tasks, e.g., friend and location recommendations can all be solved as the problem of predicting social links among users and the location links between users and locations. Link prediction problems have been an important research topic for many years and a large number of different methods have been proposed so far. This article summaries the existing link prediction methods for both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks, which include various unsupervised link predicators, random walk based link prediction methods, methods based on matrix factorization techniques, supervised link prediction methods and meta paths based link prediction methods. Meanwhile, as proposed in recent works, people are usually involved in multiple social networks simultaneously nowadays and networks sharing common users are formally defined as the aligned networks. In this article, we will also introduce the latest progress of link prediction problems across multiple aligned heterogeneous networks. The link prediction problems across aligned networks can include anchor link prediction problem and link transfer across aligned heterogeneous networks. We will introduce the newly proposed methods to solve these problems in details and, finally, we will conclude this survey with a discussion about the future link prediction research works.