Cohesion Network Analysis for Predicting User Ranks in Reddit Communities

Social media consists of interactive applications which bring together people from different geographical regions through technology. Online communities have become increasingly popular due to their capabilities to virtually connect people with similar interests. Based on their activity, a social rank is computed to measure how users are perceived within the community. The aim of this paper is to perform an in-depth analysis of a debate community from Reddit. Our method provides tailored services capable to analyze user behavior based on regularity measures, model the interactions between participants, and predict a social rank for users based on their participation. The ReaderBench framework has been used to generate multiple indices, including those for textual complexity, reflective of writing style specificities. Various regression models were trained and evaluated in order to predict users’ rankings, which are reflected in the number of votes they receive from their peers. The results show that the user ranks are predicted with a precision of 15 votes by using MLP neural networks.