OLFinder: Finding opinion leaders in online social networks

Opinion leaders are the influential people who are able to shape the minds and thoughts of other people in their society. Finding opinion leaders is an important task in various domains ranging from marketing to politics. In this paper, a new effective algorithm for finding opinion leaders in a given domain in online social networks is introduced. The proposed algorithm, named OLFinder, detects the main topics of discussion in a given domain, calculates a competency and a popularity score for each user in the given domain, then calculates a probability for being an opinion leader in that domain by using the competency and the popularity scores and finally ranks the users of the social network based on their probability of being an opinion leader. Our experimental results show that OLFinder outperforms other methods based on precision-recall, average precision and P@N measures.