Learning From Multiple Social Networks

With the proliferation of social network services, more and more social users, such as individuals and organizations, are simultaneously involved in multiple social networks for various purposes. In fact, multiple social networks characterize the same social users from different perspectives, and their contexts are usually consistent or complementary rather than independent. Hence, as compared to using information from a single social network, appropriate aggregation of multiple social networks offers us a better way to comprehensively understand the given social users. Learning across multiple social networks brings opportunities to new services and applications as well as new insights on user online behaviors, yet it raises tough challenges: (1) How can we map different social network accounts to the same social users? (2) How can we complete the item-wise and block-wise missing data? (3) How can we leverage the relatedness among sources to strengthen the learning performance? And (4) How can we jointly model the dual-heterogeneities: multiple tasks exist for the given application and each task has various features from multiple sources? These questions have been largely unexplored to date. We noticed this timely opportunity, and in this book we present some state-of-the-art theories and novel practical applications on aggregation of multiple social networks. In particular, we first introduce multi-source dataset construction. We then introduce how to effectively and efficiently complete the item-wise and block-wise missing data, which are caused by the inactive social users in some social networks. We next detail the proposed multi-source mono-task learning model and its application in volunteerism tendency prediction. As a counterpart, we also present a mono-source multi-task learning model and apply it to user interest inference. We seamlessly unify these models with the so-called multi-source multi-task learning, and demonstrate several application scenarios, such as occupation prediction. Finally, we conclude the book and figure out the future research directions in multiple social network learning, including the privacy issues and source complementarity modeling. This is preliminary research on learning from multiple social networks, and we hope it can inspire more active researchers to work on this exciting area. If we have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to broad learning, one of the novel learning problems studied in data mining and machine learning. Broad learning aims at fusing multiple large-scale information sources of diverse varieties together, and carrying out synergistic data mining tasks across these fused sources in one unified analytic. This book takes online social networks as an application example to introduce the latest alignment and knowledge discovery algorithms. Besides the overview of broad learning, machine learning and social network basics, specific topics covered in this book include network alignment, link prediction, community detection, information diffusion, viral marketing, and network embedding.

Social Network Analytics: Computational Research Methods and Techniques focuses on various technical concepts and aspects of social network analysis. The book features the latest developments and findings in this emerging area of research. In addition, it includes a variety of applications from several domains, such as scientific research, and the business and industrial sectors. The technical aspects of analysis are covered in detail, including visualizing and modeling, network theory, mathematical models, the big data analytics of social networks, multidimensional scaling, and more. As analyzing social network data is rapidly gaining interest in the scientific research community because of the importance of the information and insights that can be culled from the wealth of data inherent in the various aspects of the network, this book provides insights on measuring the relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and more. Examines a variety of data analytic techniques that can be applied to social networks Discusses various methods of visualizing, modeling and tracking network patterns, organization, growth and change Covers the most recent research on social network analysis and includes applications to a number of domains

Much of the world has access to internet and social media. The internet has quickly become a new hub for not only communication, but also community development. In most communities, people develop new cultural norms and identity development through social media usage. However, while these new lines of communication are helpful to many, challenges such as social media addiction, cyberbullying, and misinformation lurk on the internet and threaten forces both within and beyond the internet. The Research Anthology on Usage, Identity, and Impact of Social Media on Society and Culture is a comprehensive resource on the impact social media has on an individuals’ identity formation as well as its usage within society and cultures. It explores new research methodologies and findings into the behavior of users on social media as well as the effects of social media on society and culture as a whole. Covering topics such as cultural diversity, online deception, and youth impact, this major reference work is an essential resource for computer scientists, online community moderators, sociologists, business leaders and managers, marketers, advertising agencies, government officials, libraries, students and faculty of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

This book is the first of three volumes that illustrate the concept of social networks from a computational point of view. The book contains contributions from a international selection of world-class experts, with a specific focus on practical tools, applications, and open avenues for further research (the other two volumes review issues of Security and Privacy, and Mining and Visualization in CSNs). Topics and features: presents the latest advances in CSNs, and illustrates how organizations can gain a competitive advantage by applying these ideas in real-world scenarios; discusses the design and use of a wide range of computational tools and software for social network analysis; describes simulations of social networks, the representation and analysis of social networks, and the use of semantic networks in knowledge discovery and visualization; provides experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories relating to specific problems in network technology.

Social Networks with Rich Edge Semantics introduces a new mechanism for representing social networks in which pairwise relationships can be drawn from a range of realistic possibilities, including different types of relationships, different strengths in the directions of a pair, positive and negative relationships, and relationships whose intensities change with time. For each possibility, the book shows how to model the social network using spectral embedding. It also shows how to compose the techniques so that multiple edge semantics can be modeled together, and the modeling techniques are then applied to a range of datasets. Features Introduces the reader to difficulties with current social network analysis, and the need for richer representations of relationships among nodes, including accounting for intensity, direction, type, positive/negative, and changing intensities over time Presents a novel mechanism to allow social networks with qualitatively different kinds of relationships to be described and analyzed Includes extensions to the important technique of spectral embedding, shows that they are mathematically well motivated and proves that their results are appropriate Shows how to exploit embeddings to understand structures within social networks, including subgroups, positional significance, link or edge prediction, consistency of role in different contexts, and net flow of properties through a node Illustrates the use of the approach for real-world problems for online social networks, criminal and drug smuggling networks, and networks where the nodes are themselves groups Suitable for researchers and students in social network research, data science, statistical learning, and related areas, this book will help to provide a deeper understanding of real-world social networks.

Does your startup rely on social network analysis? This concise guide provides a statistical framework to help you identify social processes hidden among the tons of data now available. Social network analysis (SNA) is a discipline that predates Facebook and Twitter by 30 years. Through expert SNA researchers, you'll learn concepts and techniques for recognizing patterns in social media, political groups, companies, cultural trends, and interpersonal networks. You'll also learn how to use Python and other open source tools—such as NetworkX, NumPy, and Matplotlib—to gather, analyze, and visualize social data. This book is the perfect marriage between social network theory and practice, and a valuable source of insight and ideas. Discover how internal social networks affect a company’s ability to perform Follow terrorists and revolutionaries through the 1998 Khobar Towers bombing, the 9/11 attacks, and the Egyptian uprising Learn how a single special-interest group can control the outcome of a national election Examine relationships between companies through investment networks and shared boards of directors Delve into the anatomy of cultural fads and trends—offline phenomena often mediated by Twitter and Facebook