Finding trendsetters in information networks

Influential people have an important role in the process of information diffusion. However, there are several ways to be influential, for example, to be the most popular or the first that adopts a new idea. In this paper we present a methodology to find trendsetters in information networks according to a specific topic of interest. Trendsetters are people that adopt and spread new ideas influencing other people before these ideas become popular. At the same time, not all early adopters are trendsetters because only few of them have the ability of propagating their ideas by their social contacts through word-of-mouth. Differently from other influence measures, a trendsetter is not necessarily popular or famous, but the one whose ideas spread over the graph successfully. Other metrics such as node in-degree or even standard Pagerank focus only in the static topology of the network. We propose a ranking strategy that focuses on the ability of some users to push new ideas that wi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Diego Sáez-Trumper, Giovanni Comarela, Virgílio A. F. Almeida, Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates, Fabrício Benevenuto
• Keywords: Data Mining, Early Adopters, KDD 2012, Retrieval Models, Temporal Attributes