Data science: Identifying influencers in social networks

Abstract

Data science is a "concept to unify statistics, data analysis and their related methods" in order to "understand and analyze actual phenomena" with data. The common use of Online Social Networks (OSN)[2] for networking communication which authorizes real-time multimedia capturing and sharing, have led to enormous amounts of user-generated content in online, and made publicly available for analysis and mining. The efforts have been made for more privacy awareness to protect personal data against privacy threats. The principal idea in designing different marketing strategies is to identify the influencers in the network communication. The individuals influential induce "word-of-mouth" that effects in the network are responsible for causing particular action of influence that convinces their peers (followers) to perform a similar action in buying a product. Targeting these influencers usually leads to a vast spread of the information across the network. Hence it is important to identify such individuals in a network, we use centrality measures to identify assign an influence score to each user. The user with higher score is considered as a better influencer.