Discovering Influence Hierarchy Based on Frequent Social Interactions

In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of discovering influence hierarchy to organize influential users in a social network into different levels according to their potential of spreading influence. We present a novel approach of discovering influence hierarchy utilizing the temporal aspect and flow direction of interactions among users. The influence hierarchy has the potential to visualize the information flow of the network and identify different roles such as creators, information disseminators, emerging leaders and active followers. It is highly applicable in several domains such as sociology, marketing, political science and disaster management.