A Survey of Prediction Using Social Media

TL;DR

This survey reviews how social media data can be used to predict social phenomena, discussing current capabilities, methods, challenges, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of prediction techniques and challenges in social media analysis, highlighting areas for future exploration.

Findings

Social media enables prediction of social structures and events.

Various predictors and techniques are used for social media-based predictions.

There are significant challenges and open questions in social media prediction.

Abstract

Social media comprises interactive applications and platforms for creating, sharing and exchange of user-generated contents. The past ten years have brought huge growth in social media, especially online social networking services, and it is changing our ways to organize and communicate. It aggregates opinions and feelings of diverse groups of people at low cost. Mining the attributes and contents of social media gives us an opportunity to discover social structure characteristics, analyze action patterns qualitatively and quantitatively, and sometimes the ability to predict future human related events. In this paper, we firstly discuss the realms which can be predicted with current social media, then overview available predictors and techniques of prediction, and finally discuss challenges and possible future directions.