Characterizing influential leaders of Ecuador on Twitter using computational intelligence

The popularity of social networks, such as Twitter, have provided users around the world the ability to share information, express opinions or sentiments about any topic. Twitter has become the preferred social network platform used by researchers for measuring popularity or influence of users in social networks. This study seeks to extend analysis of influential users in the spatial context of Ecuador, applying computational intelligence techniques in order to identify influential users and for those users calculate its ranking. The results show that a careful selection and normalization of features found in the Twitter user's profile, allows us to detect influential users with high degree of accuracy, and then calculate the ranking only over those users. This approach provide a quicker method compared to previous techniques for determining the ranking by filtering non-influential users.