Social Networks Data Mining Using Visual Analytics

Abstract

Internet-based social networks are facilities (typically web sites) where people can form online communities, connect to each other and share information. This paper explores the area of applying visual analytics to represent data and underlying relationships in social networks-more specifically, on the Twitter micro-blogging service. Networks of this kind can be treated as graphs, where each node corresponds to a user or a specific piece of information and edges connect such nodes representing relationships. Visualizing graphs is a vast research area in its own right, with numerous applications in science and engineering. In this assignment we are using readily-available software to visualize parts of the network, via filtering or other operations, in order to be able to draw conclusions. Social networks are an excellent candidate to apply visual analytics to, due to their exponential growth when new users join.