%A Xu Yabin, Sun Qiutian %T Identifying Leaders and Dissemination Paths of Public Opinion %0 Journal Article %D 2021 %J Data Analysis and Knowledge Discovery %R 10.11925/infotech.2096-3467.2020.1027 %P 32-42 %V 5 %N 2 %U {https://manu44.magtech.com.cn/Jwk_infotech_wk3/CN/abstract/article_4952.shtml} %8 2021-02-25 %X

[Objective] This study proposes new method to monitor social media, aiming to limit or guide the spread of public opinion. [Methods] First, we constructed an OLMT model to identify opinion leaders based on the dissemination force and topological potential. Then, we modified the Transformer model to build a social media behavior prediction model (MF-Transformer) with high parallelism and attention mechanism. [Results] The proposed models identified opinion leaders and their retweeting behaviors, as well as the main dissemination paths of online public opinion. The recall and accuracy of the predicted results were 92.17% and 99.07%, respectively, which were higher than those of the existing methods. [Limitations] We only examined our new models with data from Sina Weibo. [Conclusions] The proposed models could effectively identify online opinion leaders, as well as predict the dissemination paths of their comments and retweets.