InfluenceRank: A machine learning approach to measure influence of Twitter users

Abstract

We devise a system for measuring influence of Twitter users, which we call InfluenceRank, based on certain features extracted from their Twitter profiles and tweets authored over the duration of two months. As in the real world, influence of a user on social media may be judged by the engagement they drive through the content they publish. For a tweet, engagement can be most obviously measured by the number of retweets (RTs), favourites and replies it gets. Our system comprises of a regression based machine learning approach with InfluenceRank as the predictor variable against the set of our proposed features. The regression model has shown reasonable accuracy despite being fit on limited data.