An Opinion-Leader Mining Method in Social Networks With a Phased-Clustering Perspective

Opinion-leader mining in social networks is a critical problem in research of the information dissemination process and in public opinion guidance and supervision. Not every social network user has a high probability to be an opinion leader. However, most mining methods identify opinion leaders among users in the whole network, which adds unnecessary calculations. To solve this problem, we propose a rank after clustering (RaC) algorithm to mine opinion leaders in social networks with a phased-clustering perspective, which has the following aspects: (1) Aiming to reduce the scale of calculation, the clustering stage clusters users in social networks using a K-means algorithm according to topological information to find the set of opinion leader candidates; (2) The ranking stage determines the user ranks of opinion leader candidates by both their activeness and influence, and we accumulate the followers' influence weighted by degree of attention when assessing user influence. In experiments, a new indicator, the C-value, and simulations based on the linear threshold model are used to evaluate the performance of the RaC algorithm. The results show that RaC is effective and accurate.