Mining Social Media: A Brief Introduction

The pervasive use of social media has generated unprecedented amounts of social data. Social media provides easily an accessible platform for users to share information. Mining social media has its potential to extract actionable patterns that can be beneficial for business, users, and consumers. Social media data are vast, noisy, unstructured, and dynamic in nature, and thus novel challenges arise. This tutorial reviews the basics of data mining and social media, introduces representative research problems of mining social media, illustrates the application of data mining to social media using examples, and describes some projects of mining social media for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief for real-world applications.