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RESEARCH PRODUCT

An approach for influence estimatation in complex networks : application to the social network Twitter

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Influence in complex networks and in particular Twitter has become recently a hot research topic. Detecting most influential users leads to reach a large-scale information diffusion area at low cost, something very useful in marketing or political campaigns. In this thesis, we propose a new approach that considers the several relations between users in order to assess influence in complex networks such as Twitter. We model Twitter as a multiplex heterogeneous network where users, tweets and objects are represented by nodes, and links model the different relations between them (e.g., retweets, mentions, and replies).The multiplex PageRank is applied to data from two datasets in the political field to rank candidates according to their influence. Even though the candidates' ranking reflects the reality, the multiplex PageRank scores are difficult to interpret because they are very close to each other.Thus, we want to go beyond a quantitative measure and we explore how relations between nodes in the network could reveal about the influence and propose TwitBelief, an approach to assess weighted influence of a certain node. This is based on the conjunctive combination rule from the belief functions theory that allow to combine different types of relations while expressing uncertainty about their importance weights. We experiment TwitBelief on a large amount of data gathered from Twitter during the European Elections 2014 and the French 2017 elections and deduce top influential candidates. The results show that our model is flexible enough to consider multiple interactions combination according to social scientists needs or requirements and that the numerical results of the belief theory are accurate. We also evaluate the approach over the CLEF RepLab 2014 data set and show that our approach leads to quite interesting results. We also propose two extensions of TwitBelief in order to consider the tweets content. The first is the estimation of polarized influence in Twitter network. In this extension, sentiment analysis of the tweets with the algorithm of forest decision trees allows to determine the influence polarity. The second extension is the categorization of communication styles in Twitter, it determines whether the communication style of Twitter users is informative, interactive or balanced.