State of Art Techniques for Social Influence Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review

Social influence plays a key role in online social networks. Information in social networks disseminate virally, due to this social networks are being used to spread influence for various purposes including behavior adoption, viral marketing, and opinion propagation. To address this social influence analysis approaches including influence maximization, initial spreaders identification, and influencer\textquotesingle s rankings are being adopted by various practitioners. Although massive research efforts are being made to measure influence epidemic in social networks however there are several areas which are still challenging. More robust and efficient techniques are required to incorporate topic distribution and network structure in a single model and to estimate diffusion models being used on real large networks. The objective of this literature review is to explore state of art techniques to analyze influence epidemic in social networks. For this purpose, we retrieved 9 research papers published between 2014 and 2018. This paper classifies the most frequent research work pertaining to social influence analysis. Detailed analysis in this area shows what significant SIA models and approaches are being employed. Their characteristics, achievements, and limitations are also presented. The SLR process is used to classify research work. We highlighted 3 research questions that are further utilized as the foundation of our literature review. The inclusion/exclusion criteria and the review protocol were used to narrow initially identified papers to focus on 9 papers. The results of this SLR include answers to research questions. The result provides an overview of methods, techniques, and models being employed in influence measurement, their characteristics, dataset used as well as strengths and limitations along with several promising future directions in the subject from 9 research papers. This literature review will help out researchers and practitioners to adopt the best practices in the area of SIA.