Identifying opinion leaders in social networks with topic limitation

Abstract

The social networks have been an important platform for people to share and exchange information in their daily life. There are some most critical users called opinion leaders who are always used to achieve the maximization of information transmission and suppress the diffusion of rumours in a short time. Many methods have been proposed by researches for these users. For identifying more accurately and efficiently, we make a further analysis for the real information spread and find that the information is commonly topic sensitive and opinion leaders are always topic limited. In the certain topic area, the users with higher authority in the topic area always play a more crucial role for the information spread. What’s more, in order to quantify the authority in certain topic area, we apply a series of rigorous definitions and topic model. Finally, comparing with the other widely used methods, the result shows the effective performance of our method.