Mining Diversity on Social Media Networks

• Main Authors: LIU, Lu, ZHU, Feida, JIANG, Meng, Han, Jiawei, SUN, Lifeng, YANG, Shiqiang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Social network; Mining; Diversity; Communication Technology and New Media; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1351; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2350/viewcontent/Mining_diversity_social_2012_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The fast development of multimedia technology and increasing availability of network bandwidth has given rise to an abundance of network data as a result of all the ever-booming social media and social websites in recent years, e.g., Flickr, Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Social network analysis has therefore become a critical problem attracting enthusiasm from both academia and industry. However, an important measure that captures a participant’s diversity in the network has been largely neglected in previous studies. Namely, diversity characterizes how diverse a given node connects with its peers. In this paper, we give a comprehensive study of this concept. We first lay out two criteria that capture the semantic meaning of diversity, and then propose a compliant definition which is simple enough to embed the idea. Based on the approach, we can measure not only a user’s sociality and interest diversity but also a social media’s user diversity. An efficient top-k diversity ranking algorithm is developed for computation on dynamic networks. Experiments on both synthetic and real social media datasets give interesting results, where individual nodes identified with high diversities are intuitive.