Leveraging Graph Embeddings for Opinion Leader Detection

Nowadays, social media plays an important role in many fields, such as the promotion of measures against major infectious diseases, merchandising, etc. In social media, some people are known as opinion leaders due to their strong ability to influence the opinions of others. The detection of opinion leaders has become an important task in social network analysis. Social networks are often represented in the form of graphs which allows a large number of graph analysis methods to be used for opinion leader detection. Some studies have attempted to apply graph representation learning for opinion leader detection and achieved good results. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic framework that formulate the opinion leader detection problem as a ranking task of node embeddings. A variety of methods and datasets are chosen to analyze the performance of our framework both qualitatively and quantitatively. Based on the analysis results, we propose a strategy that combines opinion leaders detected by two different ranking algorithms to obtain a more comprehensive set of opinion leaders. And we analyze the temporal changes of the opinion leaders in one of the dynamic social networks.