A Data mining study of ranking within social networks
Abstract
Social networks have become very popular in the past few years and have become a
significant part of our personal and professional lives. As the number of participants in social
networks has grown, they have become a virtual space for exerting influence. Studies in
sociology and marketing have stressed the vital role of influence for businesses to survive;
organizations and businesses are constantly seeking to establish and expand their presence by
exploiting social networks. This has led to an implicit competition for higher visibility and
ranking within social networks. Ideally, the ranking of participants within social networks
should mirror the real world. However, this may or may not be true because of different
degrees of participation, overrepresentation due to self-promotion and the possibility of
unreliable or false information.
This thesis addresses the following related questions. What are appropriate measures
for ranking participants in social networks? Does the ranking within networks mirror those
based on traditional measures for ranking organizations? We use data mining and statistical
analysis to evaluate several measures, including a new measure based on the H-index, for
ranking participants within social networks against established benchmarks for university
programs. We find that prominence within social networks correlates in general with
prominence in the real world. We identify the best measures for predicting prominence in the
real world, and perform preliminary outlier analysis. While the observations are not proven
to be causal, they offer insights of potential value to social network marketing
Table of Contents
Abstract -- Approval page -- List of tables -- List of illustrations - Introduction -- Related work -- Ranking of users in social networks -- Reliability of social network user ranking -- Proposed methods of social network ranking -- Composite social network ranking -- Data mining study -- Conclusion and future work -- References
Degree
M. S.