Narrow Results

Online social networks have attracted remarkable attention since they provide various approaches for hundreds of millions of people to stay connected with their friends. Due to the existence of information overload, the research on diffusion dynamics in epidemiology cannot be adopted directly to that in online social networks. In this paper, we consider diffusion dynamics in online social networks subject to information overload, and model the information-processing process of a user by a queue with a batch arrival and a finite buffer. We use the average number of times a message is processed after it is generated by a given user to characterize the user influence, which is then estimated through theoretical analysis for a given network. We validate the accuracy of our estimation by simulations, and apply the results to study the impacts of different factors on the user influence. Among the observations, we find that the impact of network size on the user influence is marginal while the user influence decreases with assortativity due to information overload, which is particularly interesting.

The problem of discovering influential users is important to understand and analyze online social networks. The user profiles and interactions between users are significant features to evaluate the user influence. As these features are heterogeneous, it is challengeable to take all of them into a proper model for influence evaluation. In this paper, we propose a model based on personal user features and the adjacent factor to discover influential users in online social networks. Through taking the advantages of Bayesian network and chain principle of PageRank algorithm, the features of the user profiles and interactions are integratedly considered in our model. Based on real data from Sina Weibo data and multiple evaluation metrics of retweet count, tweet count, follower count, etc., the experimental results show that influential users identified by our model are more powerful than the ones identified by single indicator methods and PageRank-based methods.

A considerable part of social network analysis literature is dedicated to determining which individuals are to be considered as influential in particular social settings. Concretely, Social Influence can be described as the power or even the ability of a person to yet influence the thoughts as well as the actions of other users. So, User Influence stands as a value that depends on the interest of the followers of a concrete user (via retweets, replies, mentions, favorites, etc.). This paper focuses on identifying such phenomena on the Twitter graph and on presenting a novel methodology for characterizing Twitter Influential Users. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that we have incorporated a set of features for characterizing social media authors, including both nodal and topical metrics, along with new features concerning temporal aspects of user participation on the topic. We have also implemented cluster-based fusion techniques in order to retrieve result lists for the ranking of top influential users. Hence, results show that the proposed implementations and methodology can assist in identifying influential users, that play a dominant role in information diffusion.

Does a post with specific emotional content that is posted on Twitter by an influential user have the capability to affect and even alter the opinions of those who read it? Accordingly, “influential” users affected by this post can then affect their followers so that eventually a large number of users may change their opinions about the subject the aforementioned post was made on? Social Influence can be described as the power or even the ability of a person to yet influence the thoughts and actions of other users. So, User Influence stands as a value that depends on the interest of the followers (via replies, mentions, retweets, favorites). Our study focuses on identifying such phenomena on the Twitter graph of posts and on determining which users’ posts can trigger them. Furthermore, we analyze the Influence Metrics of all users taking part in specific discussions and verify the differences among them. Finally the percentage of Graph cover when the diffusion starts from the “influential” users, is measured and corresponding results are extracted. Hence, results show that the proposed implementations and methodology can assist in identifying “influential” users, that play a dominant role in information diffusion.

Social networks play an important and indispensable role in the internet, especially for governments and organizations. Social networks are information diffusion networks with users as the node and the relationships between users functioning as the vehicle. In this paper we propose three different type of algorithms to compute the user influence based on users' behavior of forwarding micro blogs and the symbol of @ in the micro blogs. We evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm by comparing the results of our algorithms and the trained data in the dataset and the results demonstrate promising performance.