30th European Conference on Operational Research
Opinion leaders – experts of social relations
Invited abstract in session WA-27: Network Analytics, stream Network Analytics and Optimization.
Area: Graphs and Networks
Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: F107
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Balázs R. Sziklai |
| Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences | |
| 2. | Balázs Lengyel |
| Agglomeration and Social Networking and Economics of Networks, Hungarian Academy of Sciences |
Abstract
Opinion leaders are one of the most important and researched group in social networks. One of the main features of this group is their paramount roles in the diffusion of new products and technologies. Opinion leaders may be viewed as experts in social relations, thus expert selection methods might be applied to identify them. We test the novel method of Sziklai (2018) as well as classical centrality measures to assess the spatial diffusion of social media. For testing a unique dataset of iWiW is considered. iWiW was the most widely used social network in Hungary before the era of Facebook. Over its life-cycle, it had more than 3 million subscribers who engaged in over 300 million friendship ties. As both the address and the time of registration of the users are recorded we can model the diffusion of iWiW as well as those individuals (i.e. the opinion leaders) who played key role in it. This allows as to test which algorithm is the most adequate to identify opinion leaders.
Keywords
- Social Networks
- Game Theory
- Big Data and Data Mining
