Book

The rapid growth of online social networks has revolutionized the way people communicate, exchange knowledge, and influence decisions. Every day, users generate vast amounts of content through posts, blogs, reviews, images, and videos, creating an interconnected environment where information spreads quickly. Within this ecosystem, opinion leaders play a vital role by shaping public perception, influencing consumer behavior, promoting products and services, and accelerating information diffusion through their expertise, credibility, and social influence. Consequently, identifying opinion leaders has become a major research challenge in artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, and social network analysis. Opinion Leaders in Online Social Networks presents a comprehensive framework for identifying, analyzing, and applying opinion leaders using advanced computational techniques. The book integrates network science, optimization, game theory, graph neural networks, reputation modeling, and community detection to provide a systematic understanding of opinion leadership and its practical significance. The book introduces novel social network-based Firefly and Whale Optimization Algorithms to identify influential users at both community and global levels. It also presents innovative community detection methods that improve the discovery of influential groups. A game theory-based approach investigates coalitions of opinion leaders through synergy, marginal payoff, and Shapley value, while a Graph Neural Network-based Opinion Leader Identification model combines trust and reputation to predict influential users and evaluate their role in information diffusion. Bridging theory with real-world applications, this book is intended for researchers, graduate students, academicians, and professionals working in social network analysis, marketing, recommender systems, healthcare, and digital communication. It provides practical insights into designing intelligent systems for influence analysis, opinion leader identification, and information diffusion across modern online social networks.