Influential Node Detection and Ranking With Fusion of Heterogeneous Social Media Information

Identification of influential nodes has emerged as one of the major challenges, especially after their use in the rapid propagation of information, epidemics, and so on in social media. Most of the previous works in this field deal with the homogeneous interactions that are not pertinent in the determination of the accurate context of the nodes due to their noisy and sparse nature. Hence, heterogeneous interactions need to be explored for the identification of influential nodes in the network. To consider heterogeneous interactions available within the network, a multilayer network (ML) has been designed in this work. Each layer of the network represents a particular type of interaction, e.g., upload, comment, retweet, reply, and mention. A heterogeneous degree ranking (HDR)-based influential nodes’ detection and ranking are proposed for the designed ML. Furthermore, multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, such as the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), fuzzy AHP, fuzzy TOPSIS, and the analytic network process (ANP), are explored for the proposed ML for identification and ranking of the influential nodes. The susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) model is used to evaluate the proposed work. In addition to this, statistical analysis is performed using the Pearson correlation, Kendall’s correlation, Spearman’s correlation, and the Friedman test on the ranks generated by different methods, which shows that the results generated by different proposed methods are consistent. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art approaches.