A social network based approach to identify and rank influential nodes for smart city

Abstract

Purpose In online social network analysis, the problem of identification and ranking of influential nodes based on their prominence has attracted immense attention from researchers and practitioners. Identification and ranking of influential nodes is a challenging problem using Twitter, as data contains heterogeneous features such as tweets, likes, mentions and retweets. The purpose of this paper is to perform correlation between various features, evaluation metrics, approaches and results to validate selection of features as well as results. In addition, the paper uses well-known techniques to find topical authority and sentiments of influential nodes that help smart city governance and to make importance decisions while understanding the various perceptions of relevant influential nodes. Design/methodology/approach The tweets fetched using Twitter API are stored in Neo4j to generate graph-based relationships between various features of Twitter data such as followers, mentions and retweets. In this paper, consensus approach based on Twitter data using heterogeneous features has been proposed based on various features such as like, mentions and retweets to generate individual list of top-k influential nodes based on each features. Findings The heterogeneous features are meant for integrating to accomplish identification and ranking tasks with low computational complexity, i.e. O(n), which is suitable for large-scale online social network with better accuracy than baselines. Originality/value Identified influential nodes can act as source in making public decisions and their opinion give insights to urban governance bodies such as municipal corporation as well as similar organization responsible for smart urban governance and smart city development.