Popularity Evaluation Model for Microbloggers Online Social Network

Recently, microblogging is widely studied by the researchers in the domain of the online social network (OSN). How to evaluate the popularities of microblogging users is an important research field, which can be applied to commercial advertising, user behavior analysis and information dissemination, and so forth. Previous studies on the evaluation methods cannot effectively solve and accurately evaluate the popularities of the microbloggers. In this paper, we proposed an electromagnetic field theory based model to analyze the popularities of microbloggers. The concept of the source in microblogging field is first put forward, which is based on the concept of source in the electromagnetic field; then, one’s microblogging flux is calculated according to his/her behaviors (send or receive feedbacks) on the microblogging platform; finally, we used three methods to calculate one’s microblogging flux density, which can represent one’s popularity on the microblogging platform. In the experimental work, we evaluated our model using real microblogging data and selected the best one from the three popularity measure methods. We also compared our model with the classic PageRank algorithm; and the results show that our model is more effective and accurate to evaluate the popularities of the microbloggers.