Social relationships can be divided into different classes based on the regularity with which they occur and the similarity among them. Thus, rare and somewhat similar relationships are random and cause noise in a social network, thus hiding the actual structure of the network and preventing an accurate analysis of it. In this context, in this paper we propose a process to handle social network data that exploits temporal features to improve the detection of communities by existing algorithms. By removing random interactions, we observe that social networks converge to a topology with more purely social relationships and more modular communities.
We employ the Google and Apple mobility data to identify, quantify and classify different degrees of social distancing and characterise their imprint on the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and in the United States. We identify the period of enacted social distancing via Google and Apple data, independently from the political decisions. Interestingly we observe a general decrease in the infection rate occurring two to five weeks after the onset of mobility reduction for the European countries and the American states.
Social networks are typical attributed networks with node attributes. Different from traditional attribute community detection problem aiming at obtaining the whole set of communities in the network, we study an application-oriented problem of mining an application-aware community organization with respect to specific concerned attributes. The concerned attributes are designated based on the requirements of any application by a user in advance. The application-aware community organization w.r.t. concerned attributes consists of the communities with feature subspaces containing these concerned …
We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining, and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to b…
Many groups with diverse convictions are interacting online. Interactions in online communities help people to engage each other and enhance understanding across groups. Online communities include multiple sub-communities whose members are similar due to social ties, characteristics, or ideas on a topic. In this research, we are interested in understanding the changes in the relative size and activity of these sub-communities, their merging or splitting patterns, and the changes in the perspectives of the members of these sub-communities due to endogenous dynamics inside the community.
Current approaches to community detection in social networks often ignore the spatial location of the nodes. In this paper, we look to extract spatially-near communities in a social network. We introduce a new metric to measure the quality of a community partition in a geolocated social networks called "spatially-near modularity" a value that increases based on aspects of the network structure but decreases based on the distance between nodes in the communities. We then look to find an optimal partition with respect to this measure - which should be an "ideal" community with respect to both so…
Mature social networking services are one of the greatest assets of today's organizations. This valuable asset, however, can also be a threat to an organization's confidentiality. Members of social networking websites expose not only their personal information, but also details about the organizations for which they work. In this paper we analyze several commercial organizations by mining data which their employees have exposed on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other publicly available sources. Using a web crawler designed for this purpose, we extract a network of informal social relationships among …
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；Yahoo Research, Yahoo! Inc（雅虎公司雅虎研究院）
Many real-world relations can be represented by signed networks with positive and negative links, as a result of which signed network analysis has attracted increasing attention from multiple disciplines. With the increasing prevalence of social media networks, signed network analysis has evolved from developing and measuring theories to mining tasks. In this article, we present a review of mining signed networks in the context of social media and discuss some promising research directions and new frontiers. We begin by giving basic concepts and unique properties and principles of signed netwo…
Community Discovery in complex networks is the problem of detecting, for each node of the network, its membership to one of more groups of nodes, the communities, that are densely connected, or highly interactive, or, more in general, similar, according to a similarity function. So far, the problem has been widely studied in monodimensional networks, i.e. networks where only one connection between two entities can exist. However, real networks are often multidimensional, i.e., multiple connections between any two nodes can exist, either reflecting different kinds of relationships, or represent…
We analyse the corpus of user relationships of the Slashdot technology news site. The data was collected from the Slashdot Zoo feature where users of the website can tag other users as friends and foes, providing positive and negative endorsements. We adapt social network analysis techniques to the problem of negative edge weights. In particular, we consider signed variants of global network characteristics such as the clustering coefficient, node-level characteristics such as centrality and popularity measures, and link-level characteristics such as distances and similarity measures. We evalu…
For data represented by networks, the community structure of the underlying graph is of great interest. A classical clustering problem is to uncover the overall ``best'' partition of nodes in communities. Here, a more elaborate description is proposed in which community structures are identified at different scales. To this end, we take advantage of the local and scale-dependent information encoded in graph wavelets. After new developments for the practical use of graph wavelets, studying proper scale boundaries and parameters and introducing scaling functions, we propose a method to mine for …
Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is sufficient to fully characterize the complex dynamics of psychological states in a social context. Using wearable sensors that capture daily face-to-face interaction, combined with three daily experience sampling surveys, we collected the most comprehensive data set of personality and emotion dynamics of an entire community of work. From this high-resolutio…
Social networks where the actors occupy geospatial locations are prevalent in military, intelligence, and policing operations such as counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, and combating organized crime. These networks are often derived from a variety of intelligence sources. The discovery of communities that are geographically disperse stems from the requirement to identify higher-level organizational structures, such as a logistics group that provides support to various geographically disperse terrorist cells. We apply a variant of Newman-Girvan modularity to this problem known as distance m…
American International University-Bangladesh（美国国际大学-孟加拉国）
Social data mining is an interesting phe-nomenon which colligates different sources of social data to extract information. This information can be used in relationship prediction, decision making, pat-tern recognition, social mapping, responsibility distri-bution and many other applications. This paper presents a systematical data mining architecture to mine intellectual knowledge from social data. In this research, we use social networking site facebook as primary data source. We collect different attributes such as about me, comments, wall post and age from facebook as raw data and use advan…
Community detection provides invaluable help for various applications, such as marketing and product recommendation. Traditional community detection methods designed for plain networks may not be able to detect communities with homogeneous attributes inside on attributed networks with attribute information. Most of recent attribute community detection methods may fail to capture the requirements of a specific application and not be able to mine the set of required communities for a specific application. In this paper, we aim to detect the set of target communities in the target subspace which …
Comments play an important role within online creative communities because they make it possible to foster the production and improvement of authors' artifacts. We investigate how comment-based communication help shape members' behavior within online creative communities. In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary study aimed at mining the communication network of a music community for collaborative songwriting, where users collaborate online by first uploading new songs and then by adding new tracks and providing feedback in forms of comments.
Timely and reliable sensing of infrastructure conditions is critical in disaster management for planning effective infrastructure restorations. Social media, a near real-time information source, has been widely used in disasters for forming timely situational awareness. Yet, using social media to sense electricity infrastructure conditions has not been explored. This study aims to address the research gap through mining public topics from social media. To achieve this purpose, we proposed a systematic and customized approach wherein (1) electricity-related social media data is extracted by the…
The discovery of community structure in networks is a problem of considerable interest in recent years. In online social networks, often times, users are simultaneously involved in multiple social media sites, some of which share common social relationships. It is of great interest to uncover a shared community structure across these networks. However, in reality, users typically identify themselves with different usernames across social media sites. This creates a great difficulty in detecting the community structure. In this paper, we explore several approaches for community detection across…
Prevention and intervention work done within community settings often face unique analytic challenges for rigorous evaluations. Since community prevention work (often geographically isolated) cannot be controlled in the same way other prevention programs and these communities have an increased level of interpersonal interactions, rigorous evaluations are needed. Even when the `gold standard' randomized control trials are implemented within community intervention work, the threats to internal validity can be called into question given informal social spread of information in closed network sett…
Community structure analysis is a powerful tool for social networks, which can simplify their topological and functional analysis considerably. However, since community detection methods have random factors and real social networks obtained from complex systems always contain error edges, evaluating the significance of community structure partitioned is an urgent and important question. In this paper, integrating the specific characteristics of real society, we present a novel framework analyzing the significance of social community specially. The dynamics of social interactions are modeled by…
An increasing number of social network mental disorders (SNMDs), such as Cyber-Relationship Addiction, Information Overload, and Net Compulsion, have been recently noted. Symptoms of these mental disorders are usually observed passively today, resulting in delayed clinical intervention. In this paper, we argue that mining online social behavior provides an opportunity to actively identify SNMDs at an early stage. It is challenging to detect SNMDs because the mental factors considered in standard diagnostic criteria (questionnaire) cannot be observed from online social activity logs. Our approa…
Social communities extraction and their dynamics are one of the most important problems in today's social network analysis. During last few years, many researchers have proposed their own methods for group discovery in social networks. However, almost none of them have noticed that modern social networks are much more complex than few years ago. Due to vast amount of different data about various user activities available in IT systems, it is possible to distinguish the new class of social networks called multi-layered social network. For that reason, the new approach to community detection in …
[Background]Discovering key nodes plays a significant role in Social Network Analysis(SNA). Effective and accurate mining of key nodes promotes more successful applications in fields like advertisement and recommendation. [Methods] With focus on the temporal and categorical property of users' actions - when did they re-tweet or reply a message, as well as their social intimacy measured by structural embeddings, we designed a more sensitive PageRank-like algorithm to accommodate the growing and changing social network in the pursue of mining key nodes. [Results] Compared with our baseline PageR…
This research explains the importance of transculturality in social networking in a wide variety of activities of our daily life. We focus our analysis to online activities that use social richness, analyzing societies in Yakutia (A Russian Republic), Macau in China, Uberlândia in Brazil and Juarez City in Mexico, all with people descending from Japanese people. To this end, we performed surveys to gathering information about salient aspects of upgrade and combined them using social data mining techniques to profile a number of behavioural patterns and choices that describe social networking b…
Community detection in online social networks has been a hot research topic in recent years. Meanwhile, to enjoy more social network services, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously, some of which can share common information and structures. Networks that involve some common users are named as multiple "partially aligned networks". In this paper, we want to detect communities of multiple partially aligned networks simultaneously, which is formally defined as the "Mutual Clustering" problem. The "Mutual Clustering" problem is very challenging as it…
Online social media have become an integral part of our social beings. Analyzing conversations in social media platforms can lead to complex probabilistic models to understand social interaction networks. In this paper, we present a modeling approach for characterizing social interaction networks by jointly inferring user communities and interests based on social media interactions. We present several pattern inference models: i) Interest pattern model (IPM) captures population level interaction topics, ii) User interest pattern model (UIPM) captures user specific interaction topics, and iii) …
Fakultas Ilmu Komputer dan Teknologi Informasi (Fasilkom-TI) Universitas Sumatera Utara（北苏门答腊大学计算机科学与信息技术学院（Fasilkom-TI））
In this paper we study the relationship between the resources of social networks by exploring the Web as big data based on a simple search engine. We have used set theory by utilizing the occurrence and co-occurrence for defining the singleton or doubleton spaces of event in a search engine model, and then provided them as representation of social actors and their relationship in clusters. Thus, there are behaviors of social actors and their relation based on Web.
Detecting community structure in social networks is a fundamental problem empowering us to identify groups of actors with similar interests. There have been extensive works focusing on finding communities in static networks, however, in reality, due to dynamic nature of social networks, they are evolving continuously. Ignoring the dynamic aspect of social networks, neither allows us to capture evolutionary behavior of the network nor to predict the future status of individuals. Aside from being dynamic, another significant characteristic of real-world social networks is the presence of leaders…
Nowadays, internet has changed the world into a global village. Social Media has reduced the gaps among the individuals. Previously communication was a time consuming and expensive task between the people. Social Media has earned fame because it is a cheaper and faster communication provider. Besides, social media has allowed us to reduce the gaps of physical distance, it also generates and preserves huge amount of data. The data are very valuable and it presents association degree between people and their opinions. The comprehensive analysis of the methods which are used on user behavior pred…
Community detection aims to reveal the community structure in a social network, which is one of the fundamental problems. In this paper we investigate the community detection problem based on the concept of terminal set. A terminal set is a group of users within which any two users belong to different communities. Although the community detection is hard in general, the terminal set can be very helpful in designing effective community detection algorithms. We first present a 2-approximation algorithm running in polynomial time for the original community detection problem. In the other issue, i…
Social media data has been increasingly used to study biomedical and health-related phenomena. From cohort level discussions of a condition to planetary level analyses of sentiment, social media has provided scientists with unprecedented amounts of data to study human behavior and response associated with a variety of health conditions and medical treatments. Here we review recent work in mining social media for biomedical, epidemiological, and social phenomena information relevant to the multilevel complexity of human health. We pay particular attention to topics where social media data analy…
Mining community structures from the complex network is an important problem across a variety of fields. Many existing community detection methods detect communities through optimizing a community evaluation function. However, most of these functions even have high values on random graphs and may fail to detect small communities in the large-scale network (the so-called resolution limit problem). In this paper, we introduce two novel node-centric community evaluation functions by connecting correlation analysis with community detection. We will further show that the correlation analysis can pr…
In this paper, we study two tightly coupled issues: space-crossing community detection and its influence on data forwarding in Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) by taking the hybrid underlying networks with infrastructure support into consideration. The hybrid underlying network is composed of large numbers of mobile users and a small portion of Access Points (APs). Because APs can facilitate the communication among long-distance nodes, the concept of physical proximity community can be extended to be one across the geographical space. In this work, we first investigate a space-crossing community …
This study relates the local property of node dominance to local and global properties of a network. Iterative removal of dominated nodes yields a distributed algorithm for computing a core-periphery decomposition of a social network, where nodes in the network core are seen to be essential in terms of network flow and global structure. Additionally, the connected components in the periphery give information about the community structure of the network, aiding in community detection. A number of explicit results are derived, relating the core and periphery to network flow, community structure …
Studying temporal dynamics of topics in social media is very useful to understand online user behaviors. Most of the existing work on this subject usually monitors the global trends, ignoring variation among communities. Since users from different communities tend to have varying tastes and interests, capturing community-level temporal change can improve the understanding and management of social content. Additionally, it can further facilitate the applications such as community discovery, temporal prediction and online marketing. However, this kind of extraction becomes challenging due to the…
On-line social networks have grown quickly over the last few years and nowadays many people use them frequently. Furthermore the emergence of smartphones allows to access these networks any time from any physical location. Among the social networks, Twitter offers a particularly large set of data publicly available. Here we discuss the procedure to mine this data and store it in distributed databases using Python scripts. We also illustrate how geolocated tweets can be used to study the mobility of people in urban areas.
The degree to which individuals can exert influence on propagation of information and opinion dynamics in online communities is highly dependent on their social status. Therefore, there is a high demand for identifying influential users in a community by predicting their social position in that community. Moreover, understanding how people with various social status behave, can shed light on the dynamics of interaction in social networks. In this paper, I study an evolving online social network originated from an online community for university students and I tackle the problem of forecasting …
Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；CIOP – National Research Instutute（CIOP国家研究院）
The riots in Stockholm in May 2013 were an event that reverberated in the world media for its dimension of violence that had spread through the Swedish capital. In this study we have investigated the role of social media in creating media phenomena via text mining and natural language processing. We have focused on two channels of communication for our analysis: Twitter and Poloniainfo.se (Forum of Polish community in Sweden). Our preliminary results show some hot topics driving discussion related mostly to Swedish Police and Swedish Politics by counting word usage. Typical features for media …
Social networks facilitate the social space where actors or the users have ties among them. The ties and their patterns are based on their life styles and communication. Similarly, in online social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc., multiple users belong to multiple specific communities. The social network represents large real-world directed social graphs. Detection of communities or clusters from these graphs is a problem of considerable research interest. The communities are formed using the neighboring nodes that have common edges and common attributes. Most of the existi…
The past analyses of datasets of social networks have enabled us to make empirical findings of a number of aspects of human society, which are commonly featured as stylized facts of social networks, such as broad distributions of network quantities, existence of communities, assortative mixing, and intensity-topology correlations. Since the understanding of the structure of these complex social networks is far from complete, for deeper insight into human society more comprehensive datasets and modeling of the stylized facts are needed. Although the existing dynamical and static models can gene…
Social media is becoming an increasingly important data source for learning about breaking news and for following the latest developments of ongoing news. This is in part possible thanks to the existence of mobile devices, which allows anyone with access to the Internet to post updates from anywhere, leading in turn to a growing presence of citizen journalism. Consequently, social media has become a go-to resource for journalists during the process of newsgathering. Use of social media for newsgathering is however challenging, and suitable tools are needed in order to facilitate access to usef…
In this article, we present a distributed framework for collecting and analyzing environmental and location data recorded by human users (carriers) with the use of portable sensors. We demonstrate the data mining analysis potential among the recorded environmental and location variables, as well as the potential for classification analysis of human activities. We recognize that the success of such an experimental framework relies on the adoption rate by its candidate user network; thus, we have built our experimental prototype on top of hardware equipment already embedded within the potential …
Social Network Mining (SNM) has become one of the main themes in big data agenda. As a resultant network, we can extract social network from different sources of information, but the information sources were growing dynamically require a flexible approach. To determine the appropriate approach needs the data engineering in order to get the behavior associated with the data. Each social network has the resources and the information source, but the relationship between resources and information sources requires explanation. This paper aimed to address the behavior of the resource as a part of so…
There has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of utilizing social media data for research purposes within the biomedical community. In PubMed alone, there have been nearly 2,500 publication entries since 2014 that deal with analyzing social media data from Twitter and Reddit. However, the vast majority of those works do not share their code or data for replicating their studies. With minimal exceptions, the few that do, place the burden on the researcher to figure out how to fetch the data, how to best format their data, and how to create automatic and manual annotations on the acquired…
Looking from a global perspective, the landscape of online social networks is highly fragmented. A large number of online social networks have appeared, which can provide users with various types of services. Generally, the information available in these online social networks is of diverse categories, which can be represented as heterogeneous social networks (HSN) formally. Meanwhile, in such an age of online social media, users usually participate in multiple online social networks simultaneously to enjoy more social networks services, who can act as bridges connecting different networks tog…
Social media are a rich source of insight for data mining and user-centred research, but the question of consent arises when studying such data without the express knowledge of the creator. Case studies that mine social data from users of online services such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly common. This has led to calls for an open discussion into how researchers can best use these vast resources to make innovative findings while still respecting fundamental ethical principles. In this position paper we highlight some key considerations for this topic and argue that the condi…
Earthquakes have a deep impact on wide areas, and emergency rescue operations may benefit from social media information about the scope and extent of the disaster. Therefore, this work presents a text miningbased approach to collect and analyze social media data for early earthquake impact analysis. First, disasterrelated microblogs are collected from the Sina microblog based on crawler technology. Then, after data cleaning a series of analyses are conducted including (1) the hot words analysis, (2) the trend of the number of microblogs, (3) the trend of public opinion sentiment, and (4) a key…
The growing incidents of counterfeiting and associated economic and health consequences necessitate the development of active surveillance systems capable of producing timely and reliable information for all stake holders in the anti-counterfeiting fight. User generated content from social media platforms can provide early clues about product allergies, adverse events and product counterfeiting. This paper reports a work in progresswith contributions including: the development of a framework for gathering and analyzing the views and experiences of users of drug and cosmetic products using mach…
Mining topical experts on social media is a problem that has gained significant attention due to its wide-ranging applications. Here we present the first study that combines data from four major social networks -- Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, along with the Wikipedia graph and internet webpage text and metadata, to rank topical experts across the global population of users. We perform an in-depth analysis of 37 features derived from various data sources such as message text, user lists, webpages, social graphs and wikipedia. This large-scale study includes more than 12 billion mess…
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Auburn University at Montgomery（奥本大学蒙哥马利分校）
Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years, social media such as Twitter has enabled people to share their opinions regarding elections. Social media has provided a platform for collecting a large amount of social media data. This paper proposes a computational public opinion mining approach to explore the discussion of economic issues in social media during an election. Current related studies use text…
University of Birjand（比尔詹德大学）；Birjand University of Technology（比尔詹德理工大学）
The Covid-19 virus has been one of the most discussed topics on social networks in 2020 and 2021 and has affected the classic educational paradigm, worldwide. In this research, many tweets related to the Covid-19 virus and education are considered and geo-tagged with the help of the GeoNames geographic database, which contains a large number of place names. To detect the feeling of users, sentiment analysis is performed using the RoBERTa language-based model. Finally, we obtain the trends of frequency of total, positive, and negative tweets for countries with a high number of Covid-19 confirme…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Charles River Analytics（查尔斯河分析公司）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Social media for news consumption is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination of information lead people to seek out and consume news from social media. On the other hand, it enables the wide spread of "fake news", i.e., low quality news with intentionally false information. The extensive spread of fake news has the potential for extremely negative impacts on individuals and society. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting tremendous attention. Fake news detection on social media…
We present a novel method for publishing differentially private synthetic attributed graphs. Unlike preceding approaches, our method is able to preserve the community structure of the original graph without sacrificing the ability to capture global structural properties. Our proposal relies on C-AGM, a new community-preserving generative model for attributed graphs. We equip C-AGM with efficient methods for attributed graph sampling and parameter estimation. For the latter, we introduce differentially private computation methods, which allow us to release community-preserving synthetic attribu…
Peatland fires and haze events are disasters with national, regional and international implications. The phenomena lead to direct damage to local assets, as well as broader economic and environmental losses. Satellite imagery is still the main and often the only available source of information for disaster management. In this article, we test the potential of social media to assist disaster management. To this end, we compare insights from two datasets: fire hotspots detected via NASA satellite imagery and almost all GPS-stamped tweets from Sumatra Island, Indonesia, posted during 2014. Sumatr…
