Skip to main content

Towards a Statistical Approach for User Classification in Twitter

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Machine Learning for Networking (MLN 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11407))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 1297 Accesses

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for classifying user accounts on online social networks. The main purpose of our classification is to distinguish the patterns of users from those of organizations and individuals. The ability of distinguishing between the two account types is needed for developing recommendation engines, consumer products opinion mining tools, and information dissemination platforms. However, such a task is non-trivial. Classic and consolidated approaches of text mining use textual features from natural language processing for classification. Nevertheless, such approaches still have some drawbacks like the computational cost and time consumption. In this work, we propose a statistical approach based on post frequency, metadata of user profile, and popularity of posts so as to recognize the type of users without textual content. We performed a set of experiments over a twitter dataset and learn-based algorithms in classification task. Several supervised learning algorithms were tested. We achieved high f-measure results of 96.2% using imbalanced datasets and (GBRT), 1.9% were gains when we used imbalanced datasets with Synthetic Minority Oversampling technique and (RF), this yields 98.1%.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Kim, A., Miano, T., Chew, R., Eggers, M., Nonnemaker, J.: Classification of Twitter users who tweet about E-cigarettes. JMIR Public Health Surveill. 3(3), e63 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Nagpal, C., Singhal, K.: Twitter user classification using ambient metadata, arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.8499 (2014)

  3. Oentaryo, R.J., Low, J.-W., Lim, E.-P.: Chalk and cheese in Twitter: discriminating personal and organization accounts. In: Hanbury, A., Kazai, G., Rauber, A., Fuhr, N. (eds.) ECIR 2015. LNCS, vol. 9022, pp. 465–476. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16354-3_51

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Troudi, A., Zayani, C.A., Jamoussi, S., Amous, I.: A new social media mashup approach. In: Madureira, A.M., Abraham, A., Gamboa, D., Novais, P. (eds.) ISDA 2016. AISC, vol. 557, pp. 677–686. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53480-0_67

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Kalaï, A., Wafa, A., Zayani, C.A., Amous, I.: LoTrust: A social Trust Level model based on time-aware social interactions and interests similarity. In: 14th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), pp. 428–436. IEEE, New Zealand (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  6. McCorriston, J., Jurgens, D., Ruths, D.: Organizations are users too: characterizing and detecting the presence of organizations on Twitter. In: 9th International Conference on Web and Social Media ICWSM, pp. 650–653. The AAAI Press, UK (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Tavares, G.M., Mastelini, S.M., Barbon Jr., S.: User classification on online social networks by post frequency. In: CEP, vol. 86057, pp. 970–977 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Guimaraes, R.G., Rosa, R.L., De Gaetano, D., Rodriguez, D.Z., Bressan, G.: Age groups classification in social network using deep learning. IEEE Access 5, 1–11 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Preoţiuc-Pietro, D., Liu, Y., Hopkins, D., Ungar, L.: Beyond binary labels: political ideology prediction of twitter users. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Canada, pp. 729–740 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  10. De Silva, L., Riloff, E.: User type classification of Tweets with implications for event recognition. In: ACL, pp. 98–108 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Tavares, G., Faisal, A.: Scaling-laws of human broadcast communication enable distinction between human, corporate and robot Twitter users. PLoS One 8(7), e65774 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Chawla, N.V., Bowyer, K.W., Hall, L.O., Kegelmeyer, W.P.: SMOTE: synthetic minority over-sampling technique. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 16, 321–357 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. He, H., Garcia, E.A.: Learning from imbalanced data. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 21(9), 1263–1284 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Kheir Eddine Daouadi , Rim Zghal Rebaï or Ikram Amous .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Daouadi, K.E., Zghal Rebaï, R., Amous, I. (2019). Towards a Statistical Approach for User Classification in Twitter. In: Renault, É., Mühlethaler, P., Boumerdassi, S. (eds) Machine Learning for Networking. MLN 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11407. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19945-6_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19945-6_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19944-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19945-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics