Identifying social roles using heterogeneous features in online social networks

AbstractRole analysis plays an important role when exploring social media and knowledge‐sharing platforms for designing marking strategies. However, current methods in role analysis have overlooked content generated by users (e.g., posts) in social media and hence focus more on user behavior analysis. The user‐generated content is very important for characterizing users. In this paper, we propose a novel method which integrates both user behavior and posted content by users to identify roles in online social networks. The proposed method models a role as a joint distribution of Gaussian distribution and multinomial distribution, which represent user behavioral feature and content feature respectively. The proposed method can be used to determine the number of roles concerned automatically. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to identify various roles more effectively and to get more insights on such characteristics.