Author’s Accepted Manuscript

Data Mining Techniques in Social Media: A

Survey

MohammadNoor Injadat, Fadi Salo, Ali Bou Nassif

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PII: S0925-2312(16)30683-X
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2016.06.045
Reference: NEUCOM17295
To appear in: Neurocomputing
Received date: 25 September 2015
Revised date: 3 June 2016
Accepted date: 14 June 2016
Cite this article as: MohammadNoor Injadat, Fadi Salo and Ali Bou Nassif, Data
Mining Techniques in Social Media: A Survey, Neurocomputing,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2016.06.045
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 1

Data Mining Techniques in Social Media: A Survey

MohammadNoor Injadat 1, Fadi Salo 1, Ali Bou Nassif2

1
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond St, London, Ontario N6A 3K7 Canada
2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT
Today, the use of social networks is growing ceaselessly and rapidly. More alarming is the fact that these networks have become a
substantial pool for unstructured data that belong to a host of domains, including business, governments and health. The
increasing reliance on social networks calls for data mining techniques that is likely to facilitate reforming the unstructured data
and place them within a systematic pattern. The goal of the present survey is to analyze the data mining techniques that were
utilized by social media networks between 2003 and 2015. Espousing criterion-based research strategies, 66 articles were
identified to constitute the source of the present paper. After a careful review of these articles, we found that 19 data mining
techniques have been used with social media data to address 9 different research objectives in 6 different industrial and services
domains. However, the data mining applications in the social media are still raw and require more effort by academia and
industry to adequately perform the job. We suggest that more research be conducted by both the academia and the industry since
the studies done so far are not sufficiently exhaustive of data mining techniques.

Keywords: Data Mining, Social Media, Social Media Networks Analysis, Survey

1. INTRODUCTION
Undoubtedly, the world is shrinking into a small village owing to the tangible influence of social media. It connects people
from different parts of the world, ages, and nationalities and allows them to share their opinions, experiences, feelings, hobbies,
pictures, and videos. This has opened the door for public and private organizations from all domains to promote, benefit, analyze,
learn, and improve their organizations based on the data provided in social media. Thus, the significance of social media for
academia and industry is quite conspicuous in the amount of research done by these two sectors, seeking answers to pivotal
questions.
The structure of the social media data is unorganized and is displayed in different forms such as: text, voice, images, and
videos [1]. Moreover, the social media provides an enormous amount of continuous real time data that makes traditional
statistical methods unsuitable to analyze this massive data [2]. Therefore, the data mining techniques can play an important role
in overcoming this problem.
In spite of the large number of empirical research about data mining techniques and social media, a scant number of studies
compare data mining techniques in terms of accuracy, performance, and suitability. For instance, it was observed that the
accuracy of certain machine learning techniques is calculated in various methods which makes it difficult to find answers to the
suitability of the data mining techniques.
Many researchers have selected their data mining techniques based solely on expert judgment (A31, A56). Few surveys have
been conducted in this area without giving full justification for using data mining techniques in social media [3,4]. However,
some studies discussed certain areas in the used data mining techniques in social media. In [5], Vilma Vuori, et al., discussed the
information gathering and knowledge and information sharing through social media for companies. In [6], Rafeeque P C, et al.,
the work and challenges related to short text analysis have been reviewed. Akin to this study, [7], Mikalai Tsytsarau, et al.,
reviewed the opinion mining and sentiment analysis development, providing a summary about the proposed methods of
contradiction analysis. In, [8], Sheela Gole, et al., discussed mining big data in social media and its challenges as a result of big
data features such as: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity and Value.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study that systematically concentrates on the implemented data mining
techniques in social media research, which has triggered the idea of the present survey. The review presented in this paper
discusses the published research in the period from January 1, 2007 to January 7, 2015. The goal of this study is to probe the
available articles with regards to: (I) the data mining techniques used to extract social media data, (II) the research area that
requires mining data from social media, (III) a comparison between machine learning and non-machine learning data mining
techniques, (IV) a comparison between different data mining techniques, and (V) the strength and weakness of the recommended
data mining techniques in social media.
This manuscript is divided into five sections. Section 2 explains the implemented methodology. Section 3 describes our
findings. Section 4 discusses the limitation of this review. Finally, Section 5 presents our findings, recommendations, and future
work.

2. METHODOLOGY

1. minjadat @uwo.ca (MohammadNoor Injadat), fsalo@uwo.ca (Fadi Salo)

2. anassif@sharjah.ac.ae (Ali Bou Nassif)
 2

In this review, we conducted a survey based on the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) proposed by Kitchenham and
Charters [9] methodology which consists of: planning, conducting, and reporting phases where each phase consists of several
stages. At the planning phase we created a review protocol which consists of six stages: specifying research questions, designing
the search strategy, identifying the study selection procedures, specifying the quality assessment rules, detailing the data
extraction strategy, and synthesizing the extracted data. Fig. 1 shows the review protocol stages.
The research questions have been specified based on the objectives of this review. At the next stage, we designed the search
strategy referring to the first stage to retrieve the required and related articles. We also identified the search terms and article
selection process, which is required for an accurate search. Stage three covered the selection criteria which specify the inclusion
and exclusion rules; we also included more related articles from the references in the articles we used to enrich our literature
resources related to the research questions. Stage four included the quality questions to filter the related articles. In stage five, we
described the extraction strategy used to obtain the required data which could answer the research questions. Finally, in the last
stage, we identified the methodologies used to synthesize the extracted data.
As indicated by Kitchenham and Charters [9], the review protocol is considered to be a critical element of any SLR.
Therefore, to avoid researcher bias and to ensure the quality of the review protocol, regular meetings have continued between the
authors.
The following subsections: 2.1 – 2.6 will illustrate in detail the review protocol followed in this review.

2.1. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Summarizing and providing evidence of implementing the data mining techniques in social media is our main goal in this
work. Thus, we identified the following five research questions (RQs):
1. RQ1: Which data mining techniques have been used in Social Media?
The role of this question is to specify the data mining techniques that were implemented in mining social network data.
2. RQ2: In which research areas have data mining techniques been applied?
The aim of this question is to identify the domains where the data mining techniques were applied and the research
objectives among these domains. The most frequent domain will be identified as well as any new domains suggested.
3. RQ3: Do machine learning perform better than non- machine learning in data mining techniques?
RQ3 compares machine learning and non-machine learning methods implemented in mining social media in term of
accuracy. Few articles made a comparison between machine learning and non-machine learning methods. As mentioned in
[10,11], only statistical techniques were considered as non-machine learning, whereas the other computational techniques
are considered as machine learning methods .
4. RQ4: Is there any comparison that has been performed among different data mining techniques?
The aim of RQ4 is to specify the data mining technique with high performance. The results produced by the answer of this
question will be considered as evidence of the recommended techniques.
5. RQ5: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the implemented data mining techniques in social media?
This question will prove the suitable practice of the selected data mining techniques in social media such as text mining,
media mining, content-based mining, context-aware mining, graph data mining, and multimedia mining.

2.2. SEARCH STRATEGY

The search strategy that we followed in this survey is explained in detail as follows:

2.2.1. SEARCH TERMS

To construct the search terms we followed the following procedure [9]:
1. The main terms have been concluded from the research questions.
2. We defined new terms which replace the main terms: such as jargon, alternative spellings, and synonyms.
3. The top ten data mining algorithms were selected from published papers and books [12,13].
4. We used Boolean search operators (ANDs and ORs) to limit the search results in addition to “ ” for specific phrases.
We included in our search terms the top ten data mining techniques identified by [12,13]. Fig. 1 shows the stages of the
review protocol.
The search terms used to retrieve the related publications are as follows. Note that different search terms have been used to
get more related publications. The last search date was conducted on January 9, 2015.
 “data mining” AND “techniques” OR “technique” AND “social media”
 “data mining” AND “machine learning” AND “social media”
 “social media” AND “fuzzy” AND “data mining”
 “social media” OR “social network” AND (“C4.5” OR “J48” OR “K-Means” OR “SVM” OR “support vector machines”
OR “Apriori” OR “EM” OR “expectation maximization” OR “PageRank” OR “AdaBoost” OR “KNN” OR “k-NN” OR “k-
nearest neighbors” OR “Naive Bayes” OR “CART”)

2.2.2. SURVEY RESOURCES

The following digital libraries were searched for the required articles:
 IEEE Explorer
 Google Scholar
 3

Fig. 1 Review Protocol Stages

 Science Direct
 ACM Digital Library
 Computing Research Repository
 Web of Science
 Spie

The first search process included journals, and Tier I social network related conferences, such as International Conference on
Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN),
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), and International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), from the above
mentioned digital libraries. The search terms considered cover any part of the articles (metadata) and were restricted to articles
published between January, 2003 and the January, 2015, because the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
and MySpace) began after 2002 [14].

2.2.3. SEARCH PHASES

We used the specified search terms to retrieve the primary related articles from these digital libraries. Moreover, a quick scan
of the reference from the paper we selected helped to enrich the resources to answer the research questions. The inclusion criteria
are explained in detail in Section 2.3.
The Google document platform was used to share and manage the search results and documents among authors. Based on the
inclusion criteria, 147 relevant publications were chosen as candidate publications: 83 journal papers, 64 conference papers. Fig.
2 illustrates the breakdown of the identified articles at each search and selection phase.

2.3. STUDY SELECTION

We obtained 1187 articles in the first search process. Because many articles did not provide sufficient information to answer
the research questions, we performed another filtration step (see Fig. 2).
The filtration process was conducted individually by the authors and the results were discussed in scheduled meetings to
ensure the accuracy and to resolve any differences. The selection and filtration steps are explained below:
1. Step 1: remove the duplicated articles obtained by authors and/or different libraries.
2. Step 2: apply inclusion and exclusion criteria to the candidate papers to avoid any irrelevant articles.
3. Step 3: apply the quality assessment rules to include the qualified articles that give the best answers to the research
questions.
4. Step 4: search for additional related articles from the article references obtained from step 3 and repeat step 3 on the extra
articles.
 4

The inclusion and exclusion criteria applied in this survey are defined below:
Inclusion criteria:
 Use data mining techniques in social media.
 Use machine learning and non-machine learning data mining techniques
in social media.
 Comparative studies that compare among data mining techniques.
 Comparative studies that compare between data mining and non-data
mining techniques.
 Consider the latest edition of the article of the same research (if different
versions are available).
 Consider only articles published between January 2003 and January 2015.

Exclusion criteria:
 Exclude articles that include data mining that is not related to social
media.
 Exclude articles that do not include data mining but are related to social
media.
 Exclude non-journal and non-conferences articles.

Finally, after applying all filtration steps, 66 articles were considered as the
resources for this review. The selected articles are listed in Appendix (A), Table
A1.

2.4. QUALITY ASSESSMENT RULES (QARs)

The QARs were applied in the selected studies to evaluate article suitability
in accordance with the research questions. Ten QARs were identified, and each
one is worth 1 mark out of 10. Each QAR is scored as follows: “fully
answered” = 1, “above average” = 0.75, “average” = 0.5, “below average” =
0.25, “not answered” = 0. The overall score of the article will be the
summation of the marks obtained for the 10 QARs. If the result was 5 or
higher, the article was considered; otherwise it was excluded.
1. QAR 1: Are the research objectives clearly defined?
2. QAR 2: Is the data mining background clearly addressed?
3. QAR 3: Are the data mining techniques used clearly defined?
4. QAR 4: Is the design of the experiment suitable and acceptable?
Fig. 2 Search and Selection Process
5. QAR 5: Is the study performed on sufficient social media data?
6. QAR 6: Is the data mining technique measured and reported?
7. QAR 7: Is the proposed data mining technique compared with other techniques?
8. QAR 8: Are the conclusions of the experiment clearly identified and reported?
9. QAR 9: Are the methods used to analyze the results appropriate?
10. QAR 10: Does the experiment enrich academia or industry?

The scores that resulted from applying the QARs on the selected articles are shown in Appendix (A), Table A2.

2.5. DATA EXTRACTION STRATEGY

In this stage, we explored the articles selected to extract the information
required to answer the research questions. Therefore, we have designed an TABLE 1
extraction form (see Table 1) to extract the needed data [9].
Based on the extraction form, two authors played the role of extraction and DATA EXTRACTION FORM
checking. In case of a disagreement between the extractor and checker, group Article ID
meetings were conducted between all authors to resolve any issue. Data Extractor
Some difficulties occurred during the extraction process. For instance, Data Checker
different terminology was used for the same data mining technique such as Publication Year
Authors
C4.5 algorithm is the new name of the J48 technique [15]; however, the Article Source
WEKA tool (which is commonly used by researchers) is still using the old Article Title
name J48 (A26). Moreover, some articles used different abbreviations of the Article Type
same technique such as: KNN, K-NN, Nearest Neighbor (A12, A34), Naïve Domain
Bayes, Naive Bayes, NB (A2, A37). Furthermore, many researchers were RQ1
comparing between their techniques and other common techniques without RQ2
mentioning technique names or, if mentioned, the reason behind picking RQ3
certain technique (A31, A42, A53, A55). RQ4
RQ5
 5

Not all selected articles answered all the five RQs. Appendix (A), Table A3 illustrate the RQs that were answered by each
selected study.

2.6. SYNTHESIS OF EXTRACTED DATA

To synthesize the data extracted from the selected articles, we used TABLE 2
different procedures to aggregate evidence that will answer the RQs. The
following explains the synthesis procedure we followed in detail: SELECTED ARTICLES’ TYPES DISTRIBUTION
For RQ1 and RQ2, we used the narrative synthesis method [9] were the Article Type Freq.
extracted information was tabulated according to RQ1 and RQ2.
Case Study 4
For the data extracted (quantitative) in RQ3 and RQ4, which came from
different articles that have various accuracy calculation techniques, we used Experiment 60
binary outcomes to measure the results, which are demonstrated in a Survey 2
comparable way [9]. Grand Total 66
In RQ5, the strengths and weaknesses of the data mining techniques
have the same meaning but are written in different ways. Therefore, to unify
these points, we followed the reciprocal translation method [9] which is considered as one of the techniques that can be used for
synthesizing the qualitative data.

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION TABLE 3

In this section, we will discuss the results obtained from this review. The CANDIDATE ARTICLES’ QUALITY
first subsection gives an overview of the selected articles. The result of each DISTRIBUTION
RQ will be discussed in detail in the next five subsections, 3.2-3.6.
Calcification Criteria Freq. %.
The total number of the selected studies was 66 articles (see Appendix
(A), Table A4) that implemented data mining techniques used in social media. Between 0 to 2.5 53 36%
The selected articles were retrieved only from journals published between Between 2.75 to 4.75 28 19%
January 2003 and January 2015. Appendix (A), Table A4 shows the number Between 5 to 6.75 35 24%
of articles and the percentage grouped by publisher name. The types of
Between 7 to 8.5 22 15%
articles considered in this survey are: experiment, case study, and survey.
Table 2 shows the distribution of the selected articles among the three types. Between 8.75 to 10 9 6%
With regards to the quality of the selected articles, we applied a quality Grand Total 147 100%
assessment criterion to stream the articles based on the marks gained. The
articles with grade five or greater (out of ten) were taken into consideration (see Table 3).

3.1. TYPES OF DATA MINING TECHNIQUES (RQ1)

We identified 19 data mining techniques that had been applied by researchers in the area of social media. The list of these
techniques is below.
 AdaBoost
 Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Wrapper AdaBoost
1% 2%
 Apriori Apriori
 Bayesian Networks (BN) ANN
1%
 Decision Trees (DT) 6%
 Density Based Algorithm (DBA)
SVM
 Fuzzy 22% BN
 Genetic Algorithm (GA) 20%
 Hierarchical Clustering (HC) Novel
 K-Means ME
9%
2%
 k-nearest Neighbors (k-NN) DT
DBA
Markov 9%
 Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) 2%
1% LDA
 Linear-Regression (Lin-R) LR 7% k-NN Fuzzy
 Logistic Regression (LR) 3% 7%
1%
 Markov Lin-R GA
 1% K-Means
Maximum Entropy (ME) HC 1%
 Novel 5% 2%
 Support Vector Machine (SVM) Fig. 2 Data Mining Techniques among Selected Papers
 Wrapper

Fig. 3 shows that SVM, BN, and DT are the most applied techniques in the area of social media with a percentage of 51% of
the selected articles. Novel techniques with the percentage of 9% were not considered as the one of the highest; because each
article has its dedicated novel technique. Table 4, includes detailed information about the frequencies of data mining techniques
used by the selected articles in this review.
 6

Appendix (A), Fig. A1 shows further demonstration about the

findings, it illustrates the distribution of the data mining techniques per Education
year during the considered period. Based on the figure, it can be al
clearly seen that the number of data mining techniques adopted by Business 1%
researchers in the social media area has increased dramatically in 2012 and
Managem Finance
and 2014 with 39 and 35 techniques respectively. The number dropped 3%
ent
slightly to 24 techniques in 2013. Moreover, it is worthwhile to
17%
mention that many novel techniques have arisen between 2012 to early
2015 with a total number of 12 new techniques. Governm
ent and
3.2. DATA MINING TECHNIQUES RESEARCH AREAS (RQ2) Social Public
Networks 9%
From the selected articles, we identified six general domains
62%
which applied various techniques in nine different research areas to
mine the flow of big data gathered from social media. The list of these
domains follows: Medical
 Business and Management (BM) and
 Education (EDU) health
 Finance (FIN) 8%
 Government and Public (GP) Fig. 4 Domains among Articles
 Medical and Health (MH) TABLE 4
 Social Networks (SN)
DATA MINING TECHNIQUES FREQUENCIES AMONG ARTICLES
Fig. 4 shows that social networks and business and
management were the most active domains used by data Technique Frequencies Technique Frequencies
mining techniques, with a percentage of 79% among all
domains. Government and public with a percentage of 9% AdaBoost 2 k-NN 9
represents the third active domain. Appendix (A), Table A5,
includes detailed information about all domains. ANN 8 LDA 9
For further analysis of Table 2, we investigated the Apriori 1 Lin-R 1
experiments of the selected articles and plotted Fig. 5 which
demonstrates the popularity of various types in social media BN 26 LR 4
application researches. Some experiments were conducted to
mine and analyze one or more social media applications’ data. DT 11 Markov 1
Microblogging applications such as Twitter was the most
DBA 3 ME 2
popular application for researchers with 31 experiments
followed by social networks such as (Facebook) with 12 Fuzzy 1 Novel 12
experiments. Appendix (A), Table A6, includes detailed
information about the frequencies of social media GA 1 SVM 29
applications used by the selected articles in this review.
HC 2 Wrapper 1
Fig. 6 demonstrates further information about the findings
K-Means 6
by illustrating the distribution of the domains applying data
mining techniques per year. Based on the figure, it can be
clearly seen that the number of publications has increased dramatically in 2012 and 2014 with 19 articles in 5 domains for both
periods. In 2013, the number went down to 12 articles in 5 domains. The social network data analysis remains the most active
domain among the considered period.
Among the selected articles, we identified 9 active research objectives adopted data mining techniques. The list of these
research objectives follows:
 Biometric
 Content Analysis
 Cyber Crime
 Disease Awareness
 Geolocating
 7

 Quality Improvement

Fig. 5 Popularity of various social media application in researches

 Risk Management
 Semantic Analysis
 Sentiment Analysis

Fig. 7 illustrates the distribution of these research areas. The sentiment analysis and quality improvement were the most
active areas among articles with a frequencies of 21 and 14 respectively.
MACHINE LEARNING VERSUS NON-MACHINE LEARNING METHODS IN MINING SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
(RQ3)

Data mining techniques are the process of extracting hidden knowledge from the data [16]. This can be done in many ways
such as KNN, K-means, and SVM as machine learning methods. Also the statistical methods in some cases are considered as
non-machine learning methods which used to discover patterns. As Berson, et al. mentioned [11], “statistical techniques are
driven by the data and are used to discover patterns and build predictive models”.
Out of the 66 papers identified, only three papers contain either experimental or theoretical knowledge about non-machine
learning methods. Two of these paper (A11, A19) integrated non-machine learning methods with machine learning methods to
improve the result of their proposed solution. The third paper (A53) mentioned that text mining techniques that depend on
machine learning methods are different than non-machine learning methods because of: (i) in traditional quantitative analysis
methods, conclusions are derived from the population sample, whereas machine learning methods allow the researcher to derive
conclusions from the entire population, (ii) traditional quantitative methods require the researcher to analyze the data using a
Fig. 6 Domains Distribution per Year
 8

theoretical platform, while machine learning methods give the researcher the ability to extract the actual meaning of the
mined data contained in natural language text. (iii) machine learning methods investigate the textual data without human
interaction, whereas traditional quantitative methods need the researcher to interpret the data before analyzing.
However, we disagree with the authors of paper A53 because the definition of data mining consists of three concepts [17]:
Statistics, Data (Big or Small), and Machine Learning and Lifting. Thus, data mining includes all statistics (Descriptive and non-
inferential parts of the classical statistics) and Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) for the data using the power of computers for the
purpose of lifting and learning the patterns of the data [17].
Consequently, machine learning data mining techniques and non-machine learning data mining techniques such as traditional
quantitative methods in statistics are complementary to each other in data mining
.

3.3. DATA MINING TECHNIQUES VERSUS OTHER DATA MINING TECHNIQUES (RQ4)
This RQ compares different data mining techniques that have been used in the selected articles. Since most of the articles
based their findings on either weak statistical analysis or without using any statistics, we built our comparison based on their
judgments, which relied on the experiment they made or by referring to their article references. For instance, papers (A31, A53)
indicate that the SVM technique is one of the best categorization and feature selection techniques available relying on references
published in 1998 and 2003; however, the paper was published in 2013. Further details are provided in Section 5.
After reviewing the papers selected, we found that many papers have common findings on the same data mining techniques.
For instance, papers (A31, A45, A53, A59) found that SVM outperforms other techniques such as Naïve Bayes. In contrast,
papers (A41, A51) claimed that Naïve Bayes and MLP are performed better than SVM. Some other papers (A3, A20, A35)
claimed that K-Means performed better than other techniques such as C4.5. Finally, (A42, A60) found that the DBA technique
outperforms other techniques in terms of working with noisy data.

3.4. STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF DATA MINING TECHNIQUES (RQ5)

 9

12 11
NO. OF ARTICLES 9
10 7 7
8 5 5
6 3 3 3 3
4 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1
2
0

Analysis
Semantic

Semantic
Cyber Crime

Management

Awareness

Cyber Crime

Geolocating
Improvement
Sentiment

Sentiment

Improvement
Sentiment

Sentiment

Improvement

Sentiment

Improvement
Biometric

Sentiment
Analysis

Analysis
Content
Finance
Analysis

Analysis

Analysis

Analysis

Analysis

Analysis
Disease
Quality

Quality

Quality

Quality
Risk
BM EDU GP MH SN

Fig. 3 Research Objective among Domains

This part of the review represents a good source of information where the best practices of the primary data mining
techniques could be implemented. Table 5 summarizes the data mining techniques that could be implemented in the social media
area. In addition to the traditional data mining techniques, Appendix (A), Table A7, summarizes the description and the main
features of the novel techniques proposed by the researchers.

4. LIMITATIONS OF THIS REVIEW

This study is restricted to journal and Tier 1 social network-related conferences papers in the field of data mining techniques
and social media. By applying our search filtration strategy, we obtained a large number of articles, the majority of which were
found to be irrelevant. The reason behind considering a small number of papers is to ensure that the papers selected fully match
our research objectives. Nevertheless, including more related papers would have enriched our conclusions.
We considered only the data mining techniques that were recommended by more than one paper, as mentioned in Section 3.6.
In addition, we applied rigorous quality assessment criteria to select the related articles that could provide synthesized results.
One more limitation is that having public social media datasets with clear description has a challenging task because the
nature of social media data is unstructured with different data types such as text, images, and videos [18]; this makes social media
datasets complex and in heterogeneous format [2].

5. CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS, AND FUTURE WORK

Our survey explored journal and Tier I conference papers that applied data mining techniques in social media between the
period 2003 and 2015; 66 articles were selected to answer the five RQs of this review. Our conclusions are summarized as
follows:
 RQ1: the most frequent data mining techniques used in social media articles are SVM, BN, and DT.
 RQ2: social network data analysis and business and management were the most active domains that requiring mining of
social media data. In contrast, sentiment analysis and quality improvement were the most active research objectives in these
domains.
 RQ3: machine learning data mining techniques and non-machine learning data mining techniques are both required for data
mining purposes.
 RQ4: SVM and BN are the most recommended techniques to mine social media data used by most of the papers.
 RQ5: data mining techniques have various strengths and weaknesses which make the selection of certain techniques
dependent on the type of the informative data required.

An immediate recommendation is that the area of social media still calls for more profound research that takes into account
accurate implementation of data mining techniques in the academic and industrial sectors. A thorough investigation of the
literature written in this area reveals that a significant number of the studies have not applied any statistical tests.
Quite understandably, research in the social media domain should house a twin-focus method which incorporates accurate
result recording of experiments and appropriate statistical analysis.
The systematic literature review conducted in this study reveals that quite a few articles applied statistical tests, such as
ANOVA, MANOVA, and t-test; these parametric statistical tests require normally distributed data [11]. Apparently, the majority
of the studies reviewed failed to meet this condition and, therefore, the data provided can hardly be held reliable.
Our study also found that very few surveys and case studies have shed light on data mining techniques in social media from
the software engineering perspective. By way of illustration, most of the published papers in the health domain were conducted
by health researchers, who barely provide any information about the method utilized in their papers.
In addition to the method-related gap, another one still holds as far as other domains are concerned. The domains of
Education, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Human Resource Management (HRM), among others, have not yet
been explored by software engineers. This is a gap that we recommend future research could bridge by investigating CRM and
HRM using data mining techniques. Such studies are anticipated to yield a more generic view and understanding of data mining
techniques.
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TABLE 5
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESS

DM Tech. Strength Article Weakness Article ID.

ID.
SVM One of the best techniques for solving classification A31, A41, Suffer from problem with sparse context links. A34
problems. A48, A49,
A53, A55,
A56, A66
Perform well with high dimensional feature space and A66
small training set size.
Suitable for offline clustering A60
ANN Self-Organizing Map (SOM): High level capabilities A4, A14, Median SOM: Induce maps of lesser quality than A14
that greatly facilitated the high-dimensional data A44 maps obtained by the kernel version.
analysis.
SOM: Has visual benefits. A4
DT Random Forest (RF): Effective in giving estimates of A1
what variables are important in the classification.
RF: Robust technique and perform well with variety of A33
learning tasks.
BN Very effective for text clustering. A3, A15
Simple classification algorithm. A3, A41
Very efficient in terms of computation time. A41
k-NN One of the simplest and most discriminative classifiers A29  Inferior performance on small datasets. A43
in pattern recognition.  Performance will degrade for data with high
dimensions.
 Dependent on the chosen feature and distance
measure.
Fuzzy Specialized in modeling with vague modes of social A18 Requires expertise in semantic web and fuzzy A18
reasoning and takes into account the stochastic systems to manually handle the semantic fuzzy
component of human reasoning. rule through an offline process.
K-Means k-medoids: Less sensitive to outliers. A16 Requires the number of clusters as an input. A21, A64
 Uses as few clusters as possible and captures A20 When the number of clusters increases, the quality A21
statistically and commercially important cluster of discovered clusters quickly deteriorates.
characteristics.
 Suitable for fix number of groups with unknown
characteristics based on variables that one defines.
Performs well at finding a very small number of A21 Often converge to a local minima. A32
clusters.
SK-Means: A35
 Efficient in terms of speed. Works well with high-
dimensional datasets.
 Can be efficiently parallelized and converges to
local maxima quickly.
 Can be a model which allows it to be re-used in
future classifications.
DBA Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Application with A10 DBSCAN: Includes all the density-reachable A10
Noise (DBSCAN): Does not require pre-specified points to a cluster.
number of clusters and noise filtering.
 Groups data based on their density connectivity. A42, A60 Unsuitable some real world applications, because A42,A60
 Treats noises as outliers which would not be there is no assumption about the number of
involved in any cluster. clusters with fixed topics.
 Capable of detecting arbitrary-shaped clusters.
LDA  Characterizing documents in addition to data A40 Often converge to a local minima. A32
clustering.
Suffer from problem with sparse context links. A34
 Useful to develop multimedia applications.
 Designed to exploit term-frequency.
Wrapper  Web Wrapper: Requires high level automation A65
strategies.
 Wrapper maintenance becomes unsuitable if the
pool of Web pages largely increases.
HC Does not scale the growing of data size, because it A64
relies on a fully specified similarity matrix.
 11

APPENDIX (A)

SVM 1
LDA 1
2015

k-NN 1
Bayesian Networks 1
ANN 2
Wrapper 1
SVM 7
Novel 4
Logistic Regression 2
Linear-Regression 1
6
2014

LDA
k-NN 2
K-Means 2
Decision Trees 3
Bayesian Networks 5
ANN 1
AdaBoost 1
SVM 7
Novel 1
Maximum Entropy 1
Logistic Regression 1
2013

K-Means 1
Hierarchical Clustering 1
Decision Trees 3
Bayesian Networks 8
ANN 1
SVM 9
Novel 6
Maximum Entropy 1
Markov 1
LDA 1
k-NN 5
2012

K-Means 2
Hierarchical Clustering 1
GA 1
Density Based Algorithm 2
Decision Trees 2
Bayesian Networks 7
Apriori 1
SVM 2
Novel 1
K-Means 1
2011

Density Based Algorithm 1

Decision Trees 2
Bayesian Networks 3
ANN 1
SVM 1
Logistic Regression 1
LDA 1
k-NN 1
2010

Fuzzy 1
Decision Trees 1
Bayesian Networks 2
ANN 2
AdaBoost 1
20
2008 09

SVM 1
SVM 1
ANN 1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Iteration of Data Mining Techniques

FIG. A1 DATA MINING TECHNIQUES ITERATION PER YEAR

 12

TABLE A1
SELECTED ARTICLES
ID Title Year Ref
A1 #tag: Meme or Event? 2014 [19]
A2 @Phillies tweeting from philly? Predicting twitter user locations with spatial word usage 2012 [20]
A framework for building web mining applications in the world of blogs: A case study in product sentiment
A3 2012 [21]
analysis
A4 A Novel Data-Mining Approach Leveraging Social Media to Monitor Consumer Opinion of Sitagliptin 2015 [22]
A5 A probabilistic generative model for mining cybercriminal networks from online social media 2014 [23]
A6 A semantic triplet based story classifier 2012 [24]
A7 An algorithm for local geoparsing of microtext 2013 [25]
A8 An interests discovery approach in social networks based on semantically enriched graphs 2012 [26]
A9 An Unsupervised Feature Selection Framework for Social Media Data 2014 [27]
A10 Analyzing and visualizing web opinion development and social interactions with density-based clustering 2011 [28]
A11 Analyzing the political landscape of 2012 Korean presidential election in twitter 2014 [29]
A12 Ano´nimos: An LP-Based Approach for Anonymizing Weighted Social Network Graphs 2012 [30]
A13 Ant colony based approach to predict stock market movement from mood collected on Twitter 2013 [31]
[32]
A14 Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis 2008

A15 Bayesian filters for mobile recommender systems 2011 [33]

A16 Big Data for Big Business? A Taxonomy of Data-driven Business Models used by Start-up Firms 2014 [34]
A17 BTM: Topic Modeling over Short Texts 2014 [35]
A18 Building dynamic social network from sensory data feed 2010 [36]
A19 Business Intelligence from Social Media A Study from the VAST Box Office Challenge 2014 [37]
A20 Classifying ecommerce information sharing behaviour by youths on social networking sites 2011 [38]
A21 Clustering memes in social media 2013 [39]
A22 Collaborative filtering based on collaborative tagging for enhancing the quality of recommendation 2010 [40]
A23 Collaborative visual modeling for automatic image annotation via sparse model coding 2012 [41]
A24 Confucius and its intelligent disciples: integrating social with search 2010 [42]
A25 Content Feature Enrichment for Analyzing Trust Relationships in Web Forums 2013 [43]
A26 Content Matters : A study of hate groups detection based on social networks analysis and web mining 2013 [44]
Co-training over Domain-independent and Domain-dependent features for sentiment analysis of an online
A27 2013 [45]
cancer support community
A28 Data-Mining Twitter and the Autism Spectrum Disorder : A Pilot Study 2014 [46]
A29 Decision Fusion for Multimodal Biometrics Using Social Network Analysis 2014 [47]
A30 Detecting Deception in Online Social Networks 2014 [48]
A31 Enhancing financial performance with social media: An impression management perspective 2013 [49]
A32 Enriching short text representation in microblog for clustering 2012 [50]
A33 Estimating the helpfulness and economic impact of product reviews: Mining text and reviewer characteristics 2011 [51]
A34 Exploring Context and Content Links in Social Media: A Latent Space Method 2012 [52]
A35 Gaining customer knowledge in low cost airlines through text mining 2014 [53]
A36 Intelligent Social Media Indexing and Sharing Using an Adaptive Indexing Search Engine 2012 [54]
A37 Latent Co-interests ’ Relationship Prediction 2013 [55]
A38 Learning by expansion: Exploiting social media for image classification with few training examples 2012 [56]
A39 Learning Stochastic Models of Information Flow 2012 [57]
A40 Mining Crowdsourced First Impressions in Online Social Video 2014 [58]
A41 Mining Social Media Data for Understanding Students' Learning Experiences 2014 [59]
 13

ID Title Year Ref

Mining spatio-temporal information on microblogging streams using a density-based online clustering
A42 2012 [60]
method
A43 Nearest-neighbor method using multiple neighborhood similarities for social media data mining 2012 [61]
A44 Network-Based Modeling and Intelligent Data Mining of Social Media for Improving Care 2015 [62]
A45 OMG U got flu? Analysis of shared health messages for bio-surveillance 2011 [63]
Optimizing an organized modularity measure for topographic graph clustering: A deterministic annealing
A46 2010 [64]
approach
A47 Predicting Time-sensitive User Locations from Social Media 2013 [65]
A48 Resource discovery through social tagging: a classification and content analytic approach 2009 [66]
A49 Rumors Detection in Chinese via Crowd Responses 2014 [67]
A50 Search engine reinforced semi-supervised classification and graph-based summarization of microblogs 2015 [68]
A51 Sentimental causal rule discovery from Twitter 2014 [69]
A52 Social Network Analysis in Enterprise 2012 [70]
Spreading Social Media Messages on Facebook: An Analysis of Restaurant Business-to-Consumer
A53 2013 [71]
Communications
A54 Studying user footprints in different online social networks 2012 [72]
A55 The Information Ecology of Social Media and Online Communities 2008 [73]
A56 The potential of social media in delivering transport policy goals 2014 [74]
A57 The social media genome: modeling individual topic-specific behavior in social media 2013 [75]
A58 Topic-sensitive influencer mining in interest-based social media networks via hypergraph learning 2014 [76]
A59 Twitter, MySpace, Digg: Unsupervised Sentiment Analysis in Social Media 2012 [77]
Unsupervised and supervised learning to evaluate event relatedness based on content mining from social-
A60 2012 [78]
media streams
A61 Using explicit linguistic expressions of preference in social media to predict voting behavior 2013 [79]
A62 Using inter-comment similarity for comment spam detection in Chinese blogs 2011 [80]
A63 Using Sentiment to Detect Bots on Twitter: Are Humans more Opinionated than Bots? 2014 [81]
A64 Using social media to enhance emergency situation awareness 2012 [82]
A65 Web data extraction, applications and techniques: A survey 2014 [83]
A66 What's in twitter: I know what parties are popular and who you are supporting now! 2012 [84]

TABLE A2
QARS MARKS FOR THE SELECTED ARTICLES

ID QAR1 QAR2 QAR3 QAR4 QAR5 QAR6 QAR7 QAR8 QAR9 QAR10 Total
A1 0.75 0.25 0.25 0.75 0.75 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 7
A2 0.75 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.75 0 0.75 0.5 0.75 5
A3 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.75 0.25 0.5 6.25
A4 1 0.75 1 0.75 1 0.75 1 0.5 0.25 0.75 7.75
A5 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 9
A6 0.75 0.25 1 0.5 0.75 0.25 0 0.5 0.25 0.75 5
A7 1 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.25 0.5 6.25
A8 0.75 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.75 0.25 0.75 5
A9 1 0.75 1 0.75 1 1 1 1 0.5 0.75 8.75
A10 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 1 1 0.75 0.25 0.5 8
A11 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.25 0.5 7.5
A12 1 0.75 1 0.75 0.75 0.5 1 0.75 0.25 0.5 7.25
A13 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.25 0.25 0.75 0.25 0.75 5
 14

ID QAR1 QAR2 QAR3 QAR4 QAR5 QAR6 QAR7 QAR8 QAR9 QAR10 Total
A14 0.75 0.25 1 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.25 0.75 0.75 0.75 6.5
A15 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.25 0.25 0.5 0.25 0.75 5.25
A16 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 0 0.75 0.5 0.5 5.75
A17 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.25 0.75 7.25
A18 1 0.75 1 0.75 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.25 0.5 6.75
A19 1 0.75 0.75 1 0.75 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 8.75
A20 0.75 0.75 0.5 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 8
A21 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.75 0.75 1 1 0.75 0.5 0.75 7
A22 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.5 1 0 0.75 0.5 0.75 7
A23 0.75 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 5.75
A24 1 0.25 0.25 1 0.25 0.75 1 0.75 0.75 1 7
A25 0.75 0.25 0.25 1 0.25 0.75 1 0.75 1 0.75 6.75
A26 0.75 1 0.25 0.75 0.75 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 7.75
A27 0.75 0.25 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.75 5.5
A28 0.75 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.75 1 0.75 0.5 0.75 6
A29 1 0.75 0.75 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.25 0.75 7.75
A30 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.75 0.75 0 0 0.75 0.25 0.75 5
A31 1 1 1 0.75 1 1 1 1 1 1 9.75
A32 0.75 0.75 0.75 1 1 1 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.5 7.5
A33 1 0.5 0.5 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 1 0.5 1 7.75
A34 1 0.75 0.75 1 0.75 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 8.75
A35 1 1 1 1 0.75 1 0.75 0.75 0.25 1 8.5
A36 1 0.25 0.25 0.75 0.75 0.75 0 1 0.5 0.5 5.75
A37 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 1 0.75 0.5 0.5 7.75
A38 0.75 0.75 0.25 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 5.75
A39 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.25 0.75 0.25 0.75 5.75
A40 1 1 1 1 0.75 1 0 0.75 1 0.5 8
A41 1 1 1 1 0.75 1 0.75 1 0.5 0.75 8.75
A42 1 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 0 0.75 0.5 0.75 7.5
A43 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 6.25
A44 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 7.25
A45 1 1 1 1 0.75 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 9.25
A46 0.75 0 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 6.25
A47 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.75 1 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 6.75
A48 1 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.75 0 0.75 0.75 0.5 6.5
A49 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.5 0 0.5 0.25 0.75 5.25
A50 0.75 0 0.25 0.75 0.5 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 6.25
A51 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.5 5.75
A52 1 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.75 0 0.5 0.25 0.5 5.5
A53 1 1 0.75 0.75 1 1 1 1 1 0.75 9.25
A54 0.5 0.75 0.25 0.5 0.5 0.75 0 0.75 0.5 0.75 5.25
A55 1 1 0.75 1 0.75 0.75 0 0.75 0.5 0.75 7.25
A56 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0 0.75 0.25 0.5 6.5
 15

ID QAR1 QAR2 QAR3 QAR4 QAR5 QAR6 QAR7 QAR8 QAR9 QAR10 Total
A57 0.5 0.5 0.25 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.5 0.5 0.5 5
A58 1 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 1 0.75 1 0.75 0.5 8
A59 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.75 0.75 0.5 9
A60 1 1 0.75 1 0.75 1 1 0.5 0.25 0.75 8
A61 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.75 0 0.75 0.75 0.5 5.5
A62 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.5 6.75
A63 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.75 0.75 0.25 0.5 0.25 0.25 0.75 5
A64 1 1 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.25 0.5 6.25
A65 1 1 1 0.75 1 0.75 0 0.5 0.25 0.5 6.75
A66 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.75 6.25

TABLE A3
RQS ANSWERED BY ARTICLES

ID RQ1 RQ2 RQ3 RQ4 RQ5

A1 1 1 0 1 0
A2 1 1 0 0 0
A3 1 1 0 0 1
A4 1 1 0 0 1
A5 1 1 1 1 0
A6 1 1 0 0 0
A7 1 1 0 0 0
A8 1 1 0 0 0
A9 1 1 0 0 0
A10 1 1 0 1 1
A11 1 1 1 0 0
A12 1 1 0 1 1
A13 1 1 0 0 0
A14 1 1 0 0 1
A15 1 1 0 0 0
A16 1 1 0 1 1
A17 1 1 0 1 1
A18 1 1 0 0 1
A19 1 1 1 0 0
A20 1 1 0 0 1
A21 1 1 0 1 1
A22 1 1 0 0 0
A23 1 1 0 1 0
A24 1 1 0 1 0
A25 1 1 0 1 0
A26 1 1 0 1 0
A27 1 1 0 0 0
A28 1 1 0 1 0
A29 1 1 0 1 1
 16

ID RQ1 RQ2 RQ3 RQ4 RQ5

A30 1 1 0 0 0
A31 1 1 0 1 0
A32 1 1 0 1 1
A33 1 1 0 1 0
A34 1 1 0 1 1
A35 1 1 0 1 1
A36 1 1 0 0 1
A37 1 1 0 1 1
A38 1 1 0 0 0
A39 1 1 0 0 0
A40 1 1 0 0 1
A41 1 1 0 1 0
A42 1 1 0 1 1
A43 1 1 0 1 1
A44 1 1 0 1 1
A45 1 1 0 1 0
A46 1 1 0 1 0
A47 1 1 0 1 0
A48 1 1 0 0 1
A49 1 1 0 0 0
A50 1 1 0 1 0
A51 1 1 0 1 0
A52 1 1 0 0 1
A53 1 1 1 0 1
A54 1 1 0 1 0
A55 1 1 0 0 1
A56 1 1 0 0 1
A57 1 1 0 0 0
A58 1 1 0 1 0
A59 1 1 0 1 0
A60 1 1 0 0 1
A61 1 1 0 0 0
A62 1 1 0 1 0
A63 1 1 0 1 0
A64 1 1 0 1 1
A65 1 1 0 0 1
A66 1 1 0 1 1
 17

TABLE A4
ARTICLES PERCENTAGE PER JOURNAL
Publication Venue Type Freq. % Publication Venue Type Freq. %
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT Jour. 2 3 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING Jour. 1 2
SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGIES
AI MAGAZINE Jour. 1 2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA Jour. 2 3

CAMBRIDGE SERVICE ALLIANCE BLOG Jour. 1 2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN Jour. 1 2

ANALYSIS AND MACHINE
INTELLIGENCE
CORNELL HOSPITALITY QUARTERLY Jour. 1 2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, Jour. 2 3
MAN, AND CYBERNETICS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS Jour. 1 2 IEEE/ACM INTERNATIONAL Conf. 20 27
CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN
SOCIAL NETWORKS ANALYSIS AND
MINING
ELECTRONIC COMMERCE RESEARCH Jour. 1 2 INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT & DATA Jour. 1 2
AND APPLICATIONS SYSTEMS
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS Jour. 4 6

FRONTIERS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE IN Jour. 1 2 JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL SEMANTICS Jour. 1 2

CHINA
GEOINFORMATICA Jour. 1 2 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE Jour. 1 2

IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE Jour. 1 2 KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS Jour. 1 2

MAGAZINE
IEEE COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND Jour. 1 2 NEUROCOMPUTING Jour. 6 9
APPLICATIONS
IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS Jour. 2 3 ONLINE INFORMATION REVIEW Jour. 1 2

IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Conf. 1 2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE Jour. 1 2

ON DATA ENGINEERING (ICDE)
IEEE JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND Jour. 2 3 PROCEEDINGS OF THE VLDB Jour. 1 2
HEALTH INFORMATICS ENDOWMENT
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON Jour. 1 2 TRANSPORT POLICY Jour. 1 2
INSTRUMENTATION AND
MEASUREMENT
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE Jour. 4 6 TSINGHUA SCIENCE AND Jour. 1 2
AND DATA ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY
Grand Total 66 100

TABLE A5

DOMAINS FREQUENCIES AMONG ARTICLES

Domain Frequency %
Business and Management 11 17%
Education 1 2%
Finance 2 3%

Government and Public 6 9%

Medical and health 5 8%
 18

Social Networks 41 62%

Grand Total 66 100%
TABLE A6
POPULARITY OF VARIOUS SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATION IN RESEARCHES

SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATION Frequency Ref

Blogs 8 A6, A12, A18, A22, A31, A37, A48, A55
Forums and Discussion Boards 9 A4, A5, A6, A24, A25, A27, A31, A44, A52

A1, A2, A5, A7, A9, A11, A13, A15, A17, A21, A28, A30,
A32, A35, A39, A41, A42, A45, A47, A49, A50, A51, A54,
Microblogging 31 A57, A59, A60, A61, A62, A63, A64, A66
Product Reviews 1 A33
A8, A10, A12, A14, A15, A18, A26, A32, A46, A53, A54,
Social Networks 12 A59

Video and Photo sharing 11 A9, A12, A15, A23, A29, A34, A36, A38, A40, A43, A58

TABLE A7
NOVEL TECHNIQUES FEATURES

ID Novel Tech. Features Compared with

A12 Ano´nimos  Applied to preserve linear properties by generation of inequalities
corresponding to decisions made by the algorithm during its execution.
 Preserve multiple linear properties in a single anonymized graph

A17 Biterm Topic Model (BTM)  Capture the topics within short texts by explicitly modeling word co- Outperforms the online LDA
occurrence patterns in the whole corpus. in terms of effectiveness
 Discover more prominent and coherent topics than the state-of-the art
competitors.

A37 Interest-based Factor Graph  Proposed to take both network topology and node features into
Model (I-FGM) consideration.
 Makes the most of the strong inference abilities of the probability model
and the graph model.

A58 Topic-Sensitive  Aims to find the influential nodes in the networks. Outperforms LDA in terms of
Influencer Mining (TSIM)  Improves the performance significantly in the applications of friends’ friends’ suggestion and photo
suggestion and photo recommendation. recommendation.

A34 Latent Space Method  Discovers the latent semantic space from both context and content links Extends the traditional LSI
in multimedia information networks. algorithm by low-rank
 Solve the problem with sparse context. approximation.
 The learned latent semantic space can be applied for many applications,
such as multimedia annotation and retrieval.

A32 Novel  The proposed framework performs language knowledge integration and
feature reduction simultaneously.
 Improves the short texts clustering performance.
 Scales linearly with the number of short texts and the number of
integrated languages.

A64 Online Incremental  Provide useful situation awareness information through a set of tightly Resolves the weaknesses in
Clustering Algorithm integrated components. K-Means and EM.
 Enhance timely situation awareness across a range of crisis types.
 19

ID Novel Tech. Features Compared with

A10 Scalable Distance-Based  Proposed SDC technique for Web opinion clustering.
Clustering (SDC)  Ensures that a required density must be reached in the initial clusters and
uses scalable distances to expand the initial clusters.
 Does not require a predefined number of clusters.
 Able to filter noise.

A29 Decision Fusion for Multimodal  Reduces the false acceptance rate for both single biometric traits and
Biometrics multimodal biometrics when the social network analysis is employed.
 Independently classify an actor from the relationship among actors.

A9 Unsupervised Feature Selection  Exploit link information effectively in comparison with the state-of-the-
Framework (LUFS) art unsupervised feature selection methods.

A43 Neighborhood Similarity  Encodes both the local density information and semantic information. Outperforms the k-NN
Measure  Enhances the scalability to conduct approximated nearest neighbor methods using the labeled
search. data only.
 Enhance the robustness on diversified genres of images.
A8 Semantic Social Graph (SSG)  Discovers the implicit semantic relations between entities in text Significantly outperforms
messages. Naive Bayes classifier in
 Enriches graph representation of entities contained in text messages accuracy and reliability
generated by a user.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

MohammadNoor Injadat and Fadi Salo would like to thank the University of Western Ontario for
supporting this research.

Dr. Ali Bou Nassif would like to thank the University of Sharjah for supporting this research.

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MohammadNoor Injadat received the BSc and MSc degrees in computer science from Al al-Bayt University and
University Putra Malaysia in Jordan and Malaysia in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He obtained a Master of Engineering
in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Western Ontario in 2015. He is currently working toward
his PhD degree in Software Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of
Western Ontario in Canada. His research interests include data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, data
analytics, and cloud computing. MohhammadNoor is a member of IEEE Computer Society.

Fadi Salo received the BSc and MSc degrees in computer science from Al-Ahliyya Amman University and University
Putra Malaysia in Jordan and Malaysia in 1999 and 2005, respectively. He obtained a Master of Engineering in
Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Western Ontario in 2015. He is currently working toward his
PhD degree in Software Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western
Ontario in Canada. His research interests include data mining, text mining, machine learning, social network analysis,
data analytics, and intrusion detection systems. Fadi is a member of IEEE Computer Society.

Ali Bou Nassif is currently an Assistant Professor at University of Sharjah, UAE. He obtained a Master’s degree in
Computer Science and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Western University in 2009 and
2012, respectively. Ali’s research interests include the applications of statistical and artificial intelligence models in
different areas such as software engineering, electrical engineering, e-learning and social media, as well as cloud
computing and mobile computing. Ali is a registered professional engineer in Ontario, as well as a member of IEEE
Computer Society and ACM Association for Computing Machinery.