What characterizes an influential user? While there is much research on finding the concrete influential members of a social network, there are less findings about the properties distinguishing between an influential and a non-influential user. A major challenge is the absence of a ground truth, on which supervised learning can be performed. In this study, we propose a complete framework for su...

Users of a social network like to follow the posts published by influential users. Such posts usually are delivered quickly and thus will produce a strong influence on public opinions. In this paper, we focus on the problem of identifying domaindependent influential users(or topic experts). Some of traditional approaches are based on the post contents of users users to identify influential user...

OBJECTIVE Online health communities (OHCs) have become a major source of support for people with health problems. This research tries to improve our understanding of social influence and to identify influential users in OHCs. The outcome can facilitate OHC management, improve community sustainability, and eventually benefit OHC users. METHODS Through text mining and sentiment analysis of user...

In this paper, we present a dynamic model to identify influential users of micro-blogging services. Micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, allow their users (twitterers) to publish tweets and choose to follow other users to receive tweets. Previous work on user influence on Twitter, concerns more on following link structure and the contents user published, seldom emphasizes the importance of...