Discovering Leaders from Social Network by Action Cascade

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to discovering community leaders in social network by means of a probabilistic time-based graph propagation model. To conduct the approach, we define an exponential decay function for influence as a function of time, and build action-specific influence chains by multiplying path propagation values; then, we create general influence chains by normalizing over all possible actions. In the study, our approach identifies community leaders as those people whose initiated influence chains are relatively more than the chains they involved. In our experiments, a small Facebook network dataset with 134 nodes and 517 edges is employed to assess the performance of the proposed method. In addition, several baselines are also carried out for comparison, including three naive and one user-involved approaches. The experimental results show that, compared with the baselines, the proposed method can effectively identify community leaders within the social network, achieving 0.8 in terms of F-measure.