Chapter 1

Mining Social Media: A Brief Introduction

Pritam Gundecha
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, pritam@asu.edu

Huan Liu
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, huan.liu@asu.edu

Abstract

The pervasive use of social media has generated unprecedented amounts of social data. Social media provides easily an accessible platform for users to share information. Mining social media has its potential to extract actionable patterns that can be bene cial for business, users, and consumers. Social media data are vast, noisy, unstructured, and dynamic in nature, and thus novel challenges arise. This tutorial reviews the basics of data mining and social media, introduces representative research problems of mining social media, illustrates the application of data mining to social media using examples, and describes some projects of mining social media for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief for real-world applications.

Key words: social media; data mining; social data; social media mining; social networking sites; blogging; microblogging; crowdsourcing; HADR; privacy; trust

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Citation information:

Gundecha, P., Liu, H. Mining Social Media: A Brief Introduction.P.Mirchandani, ed. INFORMS TutORials in Operations Research, Vol. 9. INFORMS, Hanover, MD, pp. 1--17