A Social Sensing Model for Event Detection and User Influence Discovering in Social Media Data Streams

Online social networks (OSNs) have emerged as a major platform for sharing information through social relationships and are one of the major sources of big data. Social networks can even accommodate sharing of live streaming data among the connected users. However, social information on social networks is often locally exploited rather than capturing the changes in the entire network over time. Obtaining user’s influence statistics is limited only in their local vicinity, which may not facilitate capturing the changes in the user and post influences across the entire network, thereby resulting in lower accuracy while measuring user’s topical influence. Moreover, low-influence users always exist in the network publishing low-quality posts. With the objectives of accurately capturing highly influential users and posts, this article proposes a novel dynamic social sensing model, named dynamic PageRank (DPRank) model, to evaluate the dynamic topical influence of the users of social information on social networks during the social information evolution. We deploy our proposed model to real-world Twitter data sets, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed model against notable existing methods while identifying the true influence of users and posts in a dynamically evolving social network.