Big Data Analytics of Social Network Data 13
thousands of friends. Among these friends, some of them care about the users
of interest (i.e., primary users) by responding to the primary users’ posts (e.g.,
like these posts, add comments to the posts, or tag the primary users) while
some other are lurkers who just observe do not actively participate in any social
network activities. How to distinguish those who care about you from those lurkers?
To answer this question, our key contribution of this book chapter is our big data
analytics techniques on social network data. Specifically, our techniques help users
discover those most interactive users who cares most about the primary users
on social networking sites such as Facebook. We first used Rfacebook to access
Facebook’s API via the R project for extracting relevant social data from Facebook.
We then executes the arules package—which is a variant of the well-known Apriori
algorithm—from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) to mine frequent
patterns and learn association rules with confidence and lift measures. Afterwards,
the discovered knowledge—in the form of association rules—are visualized by
using the arulesViz package. Hence, the knowledge discovered from this big data
analytics of social network data reveals who cares most about you on Facebook.
As ongoing work, we are adjusting the weights on different posts or activities. For
instance, we applied time-fading model to assign lighter weights to older posts and
heavier weights to more recent posts. Moreover, we are applying sentiment analysis
to identify and categorize the relevance of tag posts.
Acknowledgements This project is partially supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and University of Manitoba.
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