A Survey of Research Fields for Social Network and Corresponding Techniques

Social network is emerging as an inter-discipline and stepping deep into various fields from theoretical research and solutions of practical issues with an expanding trend, especially within the recent years. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons attributes to the large-scale body users gathering in the context of social networks through information-posting and knowledge sharing, so that massive social networking datasets are generated, which make possible that researchers can utilize the datasets mined to model social community structure, further detect patterns, trends and rules using corresponding techniques. This survey provides an overview of popular fields (e.g., viral marketing, influence propagation and social websites) for social network, moreover, introduces representative references, in which the well-known analytical methods and techniques (e.g., graph theory, data mining techniques and analysis of social network) are briefly described.