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How to Measure “Influence” In Social Networks

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In social networks, new ideas and thoughts can spread quickly. An analysis of this diffusion can answer various questions, such as the important topics or the speed of their propagation.  It is of particular interest to find people who successfully share their own ideas and concepts. These people can influence others to change their behavior and bring in new terms to the communication network. This post describes my master's thesis in which the goal lies in finding the most influential people in social networks. The thesis has been written in collaboration between the MIT and the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and the results are now implemented as new functionality in Condor 3. Various communication networks were used as test data to validate the use of this new metric as a meaningful measurement of influence. Defining influence Different applications use different definitions for the term “influence”. For example the so-called Klout Score calcu...