A Review of Machine Learning and Data Mining Approaches for Business Applications in Social Networks

Social networks have an outstanding marketing value and developing data mining methods for viral marketing is a hot topic in the research community. However, most social networks remain impossible to be fully analyzed and understood due to prohibiting sizes and the incapability of traditional machine learning and data mining approaches to deal with the new dimension in the learning process related to the large-scale environment where the data are produced. On one hand, the birth and evolution of such networks has posed outstanding challenges for the learning and mining community, and on the other has opened the possibility for very powerful business applications. However, little understanding exists regarding these business applications and the potential of social network mining to boost marketing. This paper presents a review of the most important state-of-the-art approaches in the machine learning and data mining community regarding analysis of social networks and their business applications. The authors review the problems related to social networks and describe the recent developments in the area discussing important achievements in the analysis of social networks and outlining future work. The focus of the review in not only on the technical aspects of the learning and mining approaches applied to social networks but also on the business potentials of such methods.