Effective deployment of monitoring points on social networks

As understanding social networks requires complete and real-time collection of social network data, it is critical to develop efficient data gathering methods. In particular, smart deployment of monitoring points on these networks will greatly help the data acquisition process. In this paper, we propose a monitoring point deployment strategy on social network data based on the set cover problem of user relationships, and design a greedy solution. We further use data sets derived from real social networking sites (Twitter and Sina Weibo) and a synthetic scale-free network to evaluate the proposed solution in term of the monitor capacity and the required number of monitors. The results show that the proposed solution can achieve good coverage and timely access to social network data.