A Method of Finding Hidden Key Users Based on Transfer Entropy in Microblog Network

• Meijuan Yin,
• Xiaonan Liu,
• Gongzhen He,
• Jing Chen,
• Ziqi Tang,
• Bo Zhao,

Vol. 14, No. 8, August 31, 2020
10.3837/tiis.2020.08.002, Download Paper (Free):

• Hidden key users
• Microblog
• obvious key users
• Influence
• transfer entropy

Abstract

Finding key users in microblog has been a research hotspot in recent years. There are two kinds of key users: obvious and hidden ones. Influence of the former is direct while that of the latter is indirect. Most of existing methods evaluate user's direct influence, so key users they can find usually obvious ones, and their ability to identify hidden key users is very low as hidden ones exert influence in a very covert way. Consequently, the algorithm of finding hidden key users based on topic transfer entropy, called TTE, is proposed. TTE algorithm believes that hidden key users are those normal users possessing a high covert influence on obvious ones. Firstly, obvious key users are discovered based on microblog propagation scale. Then, based on microblogs' topic similarity and time correlation, the transfer entropy from ordinary users' blogs to obvious key users is calculated and used to measure the covert influence. Finally, hidden influence degrees of ordinary users are comprehensively evaluated by combining above indicators with the influence of both ordinary users and obvious ones. We conducted experiments on Sina Weibo, and the results showed that TTE algorithm had a good ability to identify hidden key users.

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