Comprehensive survey of user behaviour analysis on social networking sites

Social networking sites play an important role in every person's life. Users start expressing their emotions online whenever any humanitarian or crisis like event occurs. A lot of sub-events are stirred up and the internet gets flooded with people tweeting/posting their opinions. Identifying user behaviours, their content and their interaction with others can help in event prediction, cross event detection, user preferences, etc. For these reasons, our research process was divided into studying user behaviour with respect to content-centric, probabilistic approach and a hybrid incorporating the two. We further investigate the existence of multiple OSNs and how they affect user behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the existing research methodologies and techniques along with discussion and comparative studies. User behaviour analysis is carried out based on content centric, probabilistic and hybrid approach. Content centric analysis dealt with analysis of the content posted which gives rise to varied applications such as gender prediction, malicious users, real-time user preferences, emotional content influence on users etc. It is observed that in probabilistic approach, most of the papers addressed, employed the clustering mechanisms followed by probability distribution for the analysis of user behaviour.