Analyzing the parallelization and structural impact of machine learning algorithms in social networks: a simulation-based approach

Abstract

Analyzing social media networks is crucial for understanding and uncovering common interests and characteristics among users within human societies. In this context, we simulated a simple application of human interaction in social networks, which involves users following others based on text similarity. We then investigated the effects of various machine learning (ML) algorithms employed in the applications to be used as recommendations to decision-making users. A novel agent-based social network simulator called distributed system and multinode processing is developed to assess the parallelization of the ML algorithms (i.e., K-means clustering, cosine similarity, support vector machine, multilayer perceptron) using bag of words (BoW) term frequency-inverse document frequency vectorization by evaluating their performance when executed in parallel across distributed heterogeneous resources. In addition, this simulator compares the effects of BoW with the Doc2Vec model on network structure by observing the differences in detected communities and resulting network graphs when a selected user follows the recommendations produced by an employed algorithm. Three real datasets were used in the experiments: Twitter, Scientific Research Papers, and Retail. This work’s contribution is a unique in-house agent-based simulator developed to analyze the impact of common ML algorithms, including supervised and unsupervised learning, on social networks.