Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T20:00:36.291Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Graph Essentials

from Part I - Essentials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Reza Zafarani
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Mohammad Ali Abbasi
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Huan Liu
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Get access

Summary

We live in a connected world in which networks are intertwined with our daily life. Networks of air and land transportation help us reach our destinations; critical infrastructure networks that distribute water and electricity are essential for our society and economy to function; and networks of communication help disseminate information at an unprecedented rate. Finally, our social interactions form social networks of friends, family, and colleagues. Social media attests to the growing body of these social networks in which individuals interact with one another through friendships, email, blogposts, buying similar products, and many other mechanisms.

Social media mining aims to make sense of these individuals embedded in networks. These connected networks can be conveniently represented using graphs. As an example, consider a set of individuals on a social networking site where we want to find the most influential individual. Each individual can be represented using a node (circle) and two individuals who know each other can be connected with an edge (line). In Figure 2.1, we showa set of seven individuals and their friendships. Consider a hypothetical social theory that states that “the more individuals you know, the more influential you are.” This theory in our graph translates to the individual with the maximum degree (the number of edges connected to its corresponding node) being the most influential person. Therefore, in this network Juan is the most influential individual because he knows four others, which is more than anyone else. This simple scenario is an instance of many problems that arise in social media, which can be solved by modeling the problem as a graph.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Media Mining
An Introduction
, pp. 13 - 50
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×