How does the data sampling strategy impact the discovery of information diffusion in social media?

Munmun De Choudhury, Yu Ru Lin, Hari Sundaram, Kasim Candan, Lexing Xie, Aisling Kelliher

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

183 Scopus citations

Abstract

Platforms such as Twitter have provided researchers with ample opportunities to analytically study social phenomena. There are however, significant computational challenges due to the enormous rate of production of new information: researchers are therefore, often forced to analyze a judiciously selected "sample" of the data. Like other social media phenomena, information diffusion is a social process-it is affected by user context, and topic, in addition to the graph topology. This paper studies the impact of different attribute and topology based sampling strategies on the discovery of an important social media phenomena-information diffusion. We examine several widely-adopted sampling methods that select nodes based on attribute (random, location, and activity) and topology (forest fire) as well as study the impact of attribute based seed selection on topology based sampling. Then we develop a series of metrics for evaluating the quality of the sample, based on user activity (e.g. volume, number of seeds), topological (e.g. reach, spread) and temporal characteristics (e.g. rate). We additionally correlate the diffusion volume metric with two external variables-search and news trends. Our experiments reveal that for small sample sizes (30%), a sample that incorporates both topology and usercontext (e.g. location, activity) can improve on naïve methods by a significant margin of ∼15-20%.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICWSM 2010 - Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
Pages34-41
Number of pages8
StatePublished - Dec 1 2010
Event4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2010 - Washington, DC, United States
Duration: May 23 2010May 26 2010

Publication series

NameICWSM 2010 - Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Other

Other4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington, DC
Period5/23/105/26/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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