Data mining techniques in social media: A survey

Today, the use of social networks is growing ceaselessly and rapidly. More alarming is the fact that these networks have become a substantial pool for unstructured data that belong to a host of domains, including business, governments and health. The increasing reliance on social networks calls for data mining techniques that is likely to facilitate reforming the unstructured data and place them within a systematic pattern. The goal of the present survey is to analyze the data mining techniques that were utilized by social media networks between 2003 and 2015. Espousing criterion-based research strategies, 66 articles were identified to constitute the source of the present paper. After a careful review of these articles, we found that 19 data mining techniques have been used with social media data to address 9 different research objectives in 6 different industrial and services domains. However, the data mining applications in the social media are still raw and require more effort by academia and industry to adequately perform the job. We suggest that more research be conducted by both the academia and the industry since the studies done so far are not sufficiently exhaustive of data mining techniques.