Whose posts to read: Finding social sensors for effective information acquisition

Abstract In the era of big data, it is extremely challenging to decide what information to receive and filter out in order to effectively acquire high-quality information, particularly in social media where large-scale User Generated Contents (UGC) is widely and quickly disseminated. Considering that each individual user in social network can take actions to drive the process of information diffusion, it is naturally appealing to aggregate spreading information effectively at the individual level by regarding each user as a social sensor. Along this line, in this paper, we propose a framework for effective information acquisition in social media. To be more specific, we introduce a novel measurement, the preference-based Detection Ability to evaluate the ability of social sensors to detect diffusing events, and the problem of effective information acquisition is then reduced to achieving social sensing maximization through discovering valid social sensors. In pursuit of social sensing maximization, we propose two algorithms to resolve the longstanding problems in traditional greedy methods from the perspectives of efficiency and performance. On the one hand, we propose an efficient algorithm termed LeCELF, which resolves the redundant re-evaluations in the traditional Cost-Effective Lazy Forward (CELF) algorithm. On the other hand, we observe the participation paradox phenomenon in the social sensing network, and proceed to propose a randomized selection-based algorithm called FRIENDOM to choose social sensors to improve the effectiveness of information acquisition. Experiments on a disease spreading network and real-world microblog datasets have validated that LeCELF greatly reduces the running time, whereas FRIENDOM achieves a better detection performance. The proposed framework and corresponding algorithms can be applicable in many other settings in resolving information overload problems.