1,106 research outputs found
A reliability-based approach for influence maximization using the evidence theory
The influence maximization is the problem of finding a set of social network
users, called influencers, that can trigger a large cascade of propagation.
Influencers are very beneficial to make a marketing campaign goes viral through
social networks for example. In this paper, we propose an influence measure
that combines many influence indicators. Besides, we consider the reliability
of each influence indicator and we present a distance-based process that allows
to estimate the reliability of each indicator. The proposed measure is defined
under the framework of the theory of belief functions. Furthermore, the
reliability-based influence measure is used with an influence maximization
model to select a set of users that are able to maximize the influence in the
network. Finally, we present a set of experiments on a dataset collected from
Twitter. These experiments show the performance of the proposed solution in
detecting social influencers with good quality.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, DaWak 2017 conferenc
Validating Network Value of Influencers by means of Explanations
Recently, there has been significant interest in social influence analysis.
One of the central problems in this area is the problem of identifying
influencers, such that by convincing these users to perform a certain action
(like buying a new product), a large number of other users get influenced to
follow the action. The client of such an application is a marketer who would
target these influencers for marketing a given new product, say by providing
free samples or discounts. It is natural that before committing resources for
targeting an influencer the marketer would be interested in validating the
influence (or network value) of influencers returned. This requires digging
deeper into such analytical questions as: who are their followers, on what
actions (or products) they are influential, etc. However, the current
approaches to identifying influencers largely work as a black box in this
respect. The goal of this paper is to open up the black box, address these
questions and provide informative and crisp explanations for validating the
network value of influencers.
We formulate the problem of providing explanations (called PROXI) as a
discrete optimization problem of feature selection. We show that PROXI is not
only NP-hard to solve exactly, it is NP-hard to approximate within any
reasonable factor. Nevertheless, we show interesting properties of the
objective function and develop an intuitive greedy heuristic. We perform
detailed experimental analysis on two real world datasets - Twitter and
Flixster, and show that our approach is useful in generating concise and
insightful explanations of the influence distribution of users and that our
greedy algorithm is effective and efficient with respect to several baselines
Opinion-Based Centrality in Multiplex Networks: A Convex Optimization Approach
Most people simultaneously belong to several distinct social networks, in
which their relations can be different. They have opinions about certain
topics, which they share and spread on these networks, and are influenced by
the opinions of other persons. In this paper, we build upon this observation to
propose a new nodal centrality measure for multiplex networks. Our measure,
called Opinion centrality, is based on a stochastic model representing opinion
propagation dynamics in such a network. We formulate an optimization problem
consisting in maximizing the opinion of the whole network when controlling an
external influence able to affect each node individually. We find a
mathematical closed form of this problem, and use its solution to derive our
centrality measure. According to the opinion centrality, the more a node is
worth investing external influence, and the more it is central. We perform an
empirical study of the proposed centrality over a toy network, as well as a
collection of real-world networks. Our measure is generally negatively
correlated with existing multiplex centrality measures, and highlights
different types of nodes, accordingly to its definition
MIMIC: a Multi Input Micro-Influencers Classifier
Micro-influencers are effective elements in the marketing strategies of companies and institutions because of their capability to create an hyper-engaged audience around a specific topic of interest. In recent years, many scientific approaches and commercial tools have handled the task of detecting this type of social media users. These strategies adopt solutions ranging from rule based machine learning models to deep neural networks and graph analysis on text, images and account information. This work compares the existing solutions and proposes an ensemble method to generalize them with different input data and social media platforms. The deployed solution combines deep learning models on unstructured data with statistical machine learning models on structured data.
We retrieve both social media accounts information and multimedia posts on Twitter and Instagram. These data are mapped into feature vectors for an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier. Sixty different topics have been analyzed to build a rule based gold standard dataset and to compare the performance of our approach against baseline classifiers. We prove the effectiveness of our work by comparing the accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score of our model with different configurations and architectures. We obtained an accuracy of 0.98 with our best performing model
A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users
On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of
users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions
in terms of network and content metrics.
Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their
characterisation still requires experimenting.
We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within
temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments
of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a
significant footprint on Twitter.
To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile
discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by
harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream.
The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics,
enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise
specific classes of online users.
The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its
empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns
in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online
activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is
publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore
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