DeepPick: A Deep Learning Approach to Unveil Outstanding Users With Public Attainable Features

Outstanding users (OUs) denote the influential, “core” or “bridge” users in online social networks. How to accurately detect and rank them is an important problem for third-party online service providers and researchers. Conventional efforts, ranging from early graph-based algorithms to recent machine learning-based approaches, typically rely on an entire social network's information. However, for privacy-conscious users or newly-registered users, such information is not easily accessible. To address this issue, we present DeepPick, a novel framework that considers both the generalization and specialization in the detection task of OUs. For generalization, we introduce deep neural networks to capture dynamic features of the users. For specialization, we leverage the traditional descriptive features to make use of public information about users. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves a high efficacy of detection performance against the state-of-the-art.