Estimating influence of social media users from sampled social networks

Several indices for estimating the influence of social media users have been proposed. Most such indices are obtained from the topological structure of a social network that represents relations among social media users. However, several errors are typically contained in such social network structures because of missing data, false data, or poor node/link sampling from the social network. In this paper, we investigate the effects of node sampling from a social network on the effectiveness of indices for estimating the influence of social media users. We compare the estimated influence of users, as obtained from a sampled social network, with their actual influence. Our experimental results show that using biased sampling methods, such as sample edge count, is a more effective approach than random sampling for estimating user influence, and that the use of random sampling to obtain the structure of a social network significantly affects the effectiveness of indices for estimating user influence, which may make indices useless.