A survey on identification of influential users in social media networks using bio inspired algorithms

Abstract

There are 4.5 billion active social media users who are continuously generating very large amounts of social big data. This data can be a vital source for prescriptive data analytics as it contains various insights about the day-to-day involvements and activities of the user. Among the large number of user profiles in a social media network, it is critical to recognize the best nodes with maximum influentiality in order to propagate messages through them so as to reach maximum number of nodes. After identifying, this seed set of nodes can be used for effective marketing through the platform. Marketing messages which are propagated via social media networks is evaluated to be the most promising form of advertisement for any product. As in the case of any other advertising strategy, the marketing team will be looking for maximum reachability of the advertisement with minimum cost. They will select the influencers in such a way that the advertisement is propagated to the maximum nodes possible, but with only limited number of initial influencers. In this study we are evaluating the suitability of bio inspired algorithms to the influential node identification problem. We are considering a sub class of bio inspired algorithms called as ”Swarm Intelligence” algorithms as they exhibits the collective behaviour of an organized group of bio species analogous to a group of profiles in social networks. This study has attempted to compare 4 algorithms which were already used for predicting the seed-set of influential users. The aim is to identify the most suitable one for the target problem and improve the same in future works.