Querying and tracking influencers in social streams

Abstract

Influence analysis is an important problem in social network analysis due to its impact on viral marketing and targeted advertisements. Most of the existing influence analysis methods determine the influencers in a static network with an influence propagation model based on pre-defined edge propagation probabilities. However, none of these models can be queried to find influencers in both context and time-sensitive fashion from a streaming social data. In this paper, we propose an approach to maintain real-time influence scores of users in a social stream using a topic and time-sensitive approach, while the network and topic is constantly evolving over time. We show that our approach is efficient in terms of online maintenance and effective in terms various types of real-time context- and time-sensitive queries. We evaluate our results on both social and collaborative network data sets.