Survey on Methods of Opinion Leader Mining in Social Networks

Opinion leaders are those who have strong influence on the public in the process of communication, directly or indirectly influence public opinion tendency and formation. Opinion leader mining in social networks is a significant task, which has been widely used in the fields of commercial marketing, policy propaganda, public opinion monitoring, and social public issues. Firstly, the origin, definition and classification of opinion leaders are described. Then a more comprehensive summary of current opinion leader mining methods is presented, which is grouped into four categories: user rating rule-based methods, social network graph-based methods, influence propagation model-based methods, and multidimensional fusion methods. The basic ideas and key points of the above methods are described respectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of each method are analyzed. In addition, the recommended evaluation metrics are given by analyzing the existing evaluation metrics. Finally, three future research directions are discussed: improving mining efficiency and effectiveness through clustering mining methods using graph neural network, designing dynamic models to meet more time-sensitive application scenarios, and dividing opinion leader hierarchies to meet different levels of demand