A Survey on Social Media Anomaly Detection

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent approaches to detecting various types of anomalies in social media, emphasizing new anomalous behaviors and highlighting future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of methodologies and formulations for social media anomaly detection, focusing on recent developments and challenges.

Findings

Summarizes existing techniques for social media anomaly detection

Identifies new types of anomalies specific to social media platforms

Suggests potential future research directions in the field

Abstract

Social media anomaly detection is of critical importance to prevent malicious activities such as bullying, terrorist attack planning, and fraud information dissemination. With the recent popularity of social media, new types of anomalous behaviors arise, causing concerns from various parties. While a large amount of work have been dedicated to traditional anomaly detection problems, we observe a surge of research interests in the new realm of social media anomaly detection. In this paper, we present a survey on existing approaches to address this problem. We focus on the new type of anomalous phenomena in the social media and review the recent developed techniques to detect those special types of anomalies. We provide a general overview of the problem domain, common formulations, existing methodologies and potential directions. With this work, we hope to call out the attention from the research community on this challenging problem and open up new directions that we can contribute in the future.