Social sensor analytics: Making sense of network models in social media

Abstract

We carefully revisit our definition of a social media signal from previous work both in terms of time-varying features within the data and the networked nature of the medium. Further, we detail our analysis of global patterns in Twitter over the month of June 2014, detect and categorize events, and illustrate how these analyses can be used to inform graph-based models of Twitter, namely using a recent network influence model called PhySense: similar to PageRank but tuned to behavioral analysis by leveraging a sociologically inspired probabilistic model. We ultimately identify a signature of information dissemination via analysis of time series and dynamic graph spectra and corroborate these findings through manual investigation of the data as a requisite step in modeling the diffusion process with PhySense. We have made our time series and dynamic graph analytical code available via a GitHub repository 1 and our data are available upon request.