We live in an age of big data. With hundreds of millions of people spending countless hours on social media to share, communicate, connect, interact, and create user-generated data at an unprecedented rate, social media has become one unique source of big data.
This novel source of rich data provides unparalleled opportunities and great potential for research and development. Unfortunately, more data does not necessarily beget better, only more of the right (or relevant) data that enables us to glean gems. Social media data differs from traditional data we are familiar with in data mining.
Thus, new computational methods are needed to mine the data. Social media data is noisy, free format, of varying length, and multimedia. Furthermore, social relations among the entities, or social networks form, an inseparable part of social media data; hence, it is incumbent that social theories and research methods be employed with statistical and data mining methods.
It is therefore a propitious time for social media mining. Social media mining is a rapidly growing new field.
It is an interdisciplinary field at the crossroad of disparate disciplines deeply rooted in computer science and social sciences.
There are an active community and a large body of literature about social media. The fast-growing interests and intensifying need to harness social media data require research and the development of tools for finding insights from big social media data.
This book is one of the intellectual efforts to answer the novel challenges of social media. It is designed to enable students, researchers, and practitioners to acquire fundamental concepts and algorithms for social media mining.
Researchers in this emerging field are expected to have knowledge in different areas, such as data mining, machine learning, text mining, social network analysis, and information retrieval, and are often required to consult research papers to learn the state of the art of social media mining.
To mitigate such a strenuous effort and help researchers get up to speed in a convenient way, we take advantage of our teaching and research of many years to survey, summarize, filter, categorize, and connect disparate research findings and fundamental concepts of social media mining.
This book is our diligent attempt to provide an easy reference or entry point to help researchers quickly acquire a wide range of essentials of social media mining. Social media not only produces big user-generated data; it also has a huge potential for social science research, business development, and understanding human and group behavior.
If you want to share a piece of information or a site on social media, you would like to grab precious attention from other equally eager users of social media; if you are curious to know what is hidden or who is influential in the complex world of social media, you might wonder how one can find this information in big and messy social media; if you hope to serve your customers better in social media, you certainly want to employ effective means to understand them better.
These are just some scenarios where social media mining can help. If one of these scenarios fits your need or you simply wish to learn something interesting in this emerging field of social media mining, this book is for you.
We hope this book can be of benefit to you in accomplishing your
goals of dealing with big data of social media.
