429 research outputs found
Validation of Twitter opinion trends with national polling aggregates: Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump
Measuring and forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is a
long-standing goal of big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has
been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can
capture the opinion of the general population. Here we develop a method to
infer the opinion of Twitter users regarding the candidates of the 2016 US
Presidential Election by using a combination of statistical physics of complex
networks and machine learning based on hashtags co-occurrence to develop an
in-domain training set approaching 1 million tweets. We investigate the social
networks formed by the interactions among millions of Twitter users and infer
the support of each user to the presidential candidates. The resulting Twitter
trends follow the New York Times National Polling Average, which represents an
aggregate of hundreds of independent traditional polls, with remarkable
accuracy. Moreover, the Twitter opinion trend precedes the aggregated NYT polls
by 10 days, showing that Twitter can be an early signal of global opinion
trends. Our analytics unleash the power of Twitter to uncover social trends
from elections, brands to political movements, and at a fraction of the cost of
national polls
Ranking of high-value social audiences on Twitter
Even though social media offers plenty of business opportunities, for a company to identify the right audience from the massive amount of social media data is highly challenging given finite resources and marketing budgets. In this paper, we present a ranking mechanism that is capable of identifying the top-k social audience members on Twitter based on an index. Data from three different Twitter business account owners were used in our experiments to validate this ranking mechanism. The results show that the index developed using a combination of semi-supervised and supervised learning methods is indeed generic enough to retrieve relevant audience members from the three different data sets. This approach of combining Fuzzy Match, Twitter Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Support Vector Machine Ensemble is able to leverage on the content of account owners to construct seed words and training data sets with minimal annotation efforts. We conclude that this ranking mechanism has the potential to be adopted in real-world applications for differentiating prospective customers from the general audience and enabling market segmentation for better business decision making
Data-driven Computational Social Science: A Survey
Social science concerns issues on individuals, relationships, and the whole
society. The complexity of research topics in social science makes it the
amalgamation of multiple disciplines, such as economics, political science, and
sociology, etc. For centuries, scientists have conducted many studies to
understand the mechanisms of the society. However, due to the limitations of
traditional research methods, there exist many critical social issues to be
explored. To solve those issues, computational social science emerges due to
the rapid advancements of computation technologies and the profound studies on
social science. With the aids of the advanced research techniques, various
kinds of data from diverse areas can be acquired nowadays, and they can help us
look into social problems with a new eye. As a result, utilizing various data
to reveal issues derived from computational social science area has attracted
more and more attentions. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we
present a survey on data-driven computational social science for the first time
which primarily focuses on reviewing application domains involving human
dynamics. The state-of-the-art research on human dynamics is reviewed from
three aspects: individuals, relationships, and collectives. Specifically, the
research methodologies used to address research challenges in aforementioned
application domains are summarized. In addition, some important open challenges
with respect to both emerging research topics and research methods are
discussed.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure
A Survey of Social Network Analysis Techniques and their Applications to Socially Aware Networking
Socially aware networking is an emerging research field that aims to improve the current networking technologies and realize novel network services by applying social network analysis (SNA) techniques. Conducting socially aware networking studies requires knowledge of both SNA and communication networking, but it is not easy for communication networking researchers who are unfamiliar with SNA to obtain comprehensive knowledge of SNA due to its interdisciplinary nature. This paper therefore aims to fill the knowledge gap for networking researchers who are interested in socially aware networking but are not familiar with SNA. This paper surveys three types of important SNA techniques for socially aware networking: identification of influential nodes, link prediction, and community detection. Then, this paper introduces how SNA techniques are used in socially aware networking and discusses research trends in socially aware networking
A Social Network Analysis of Twitter: Mapping the Digital Humanities Community
Defining digital humanities might be an endless debate if we stick to the discussion about the boundaries of this concept as an academic "discipline". In an attempt to concretely identify this field and its actors, this paper shows that it is possible to analyse them through Twitter, a social media widely used by this "community of practice". Based on a network analysis of 2,500 users identified as members of this movement, the visualisation of the "who's following who?" graph allows us to highlight the structure of the network's relationships, and identify users whose position is particular. Specifically, we show that linguistic groups are key factors to explain clustering within a network whose characteristics look similar to a small world
Harvesting Wisdom on Social Media for Business Decision Making
The proliferation of social media provides significant opportunities for organizations to obtain wisdom of the crowds (WOC)-type data for decision making. However, critical challenges associated with collecting such data exist. For example, the openness of social media tends to increase the possibility of social influence, which may diminish group diversity, one of the conditions of WOC. In this research-in-progress paper, a new social media data analytics framework is proposed. It is equipped with well-designed mechanisms (e.g., using different discussion processes to overcome social influence issues and boost social learning) to generate data and employs state-of-the-art big data technologies, e.g., Amazon EMR, for data processing and storage. Design science research methodology is used to develop the framework. This paper contributes to the WOC and social media adoption literature by providing a practical approach for organizations to effectively generate WOC-type data from social media to support their decision making
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