Identification of influential users by neighbors in online social networks

Identification and ranking of influential users in social networks for the sake of news spreading and advertising has recently become an attractive field of research. Given the large number of users in social networks and also the various relations that exist among them, providing an effective method to identify influential users has been gradually considered as an essential factor. In most of the already-provided methods, those users who are located in an appropriate structural position of the network are regarded as influential users. These methods do not usually pay attention to the interactions among users, and also consider those relations as being binary in nature. This paper, therefore, proposes a new method to identify influential users in a social network by considering those interactions that exist among the users. Since users tend to act within the frame of communities, the network is initially divided into different communities. Then the amount of interaction among users is used as a parameter to set the weight of relations existing within the network. Afterward, by determining the neighbors' role for each user, a two-level method is proposed for both detecting users' influence and also ranking them. Simulation and experimental results on twitter data shows that those users who are selected by the proposed method, comparing to other existing ones, are distributed in a more appropriate distance. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms the other ones in terms of both the influential speed and capacity of the users it selects. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.