This book will guide readers through the history of the flu. In ten chapters, it explains Influenza in a simple way. Influenza always seems to have endless topics. The flu virus, seemingly tiny, has brought on one disaster after another to human beings. 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the '1918 Flu' that swept the world. The flu, a century ago, claimed nearly one-twentieth of human life on the planet. Then it was the most deadly flu in human history.This book introduces the past and present life of the influenza virus in a light-hearted way, leading the reader to review the past from the history of the flu, the development of the flu, human immunity and health, society and the country. Through touching stories, illustrations and diagrams, it tells the great discoveries and related advances in science and technology, introduces medical knowledge related to influenza, and reviews the medical effectiveness in preventing influenza, thus displaying the ongoing battle between humans and the flu virus.Looking back at the development of science and technology, humans have relentlessly sought the prevention and control of this infectious disease, constantly guarding the path of life and health, which gradually becomes a quiet past, but only to awaken again and again.

This book serves as a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains. The contributors to this volume describe the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. This edited volume will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals working on disinformation, misinformation and fake news in social media from a unique lens.

Social computing concerns the study of social behavior and context based on computational systems. Behavioral modeling reproduces the social behavior, and allows for experimenting with and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes. The pervasive use of computer and Internet technologies provides an unprecedented environment where people can share opinions and experiences, offer suggestions and advice, debate, and even conduct experiments. Social computing facilitates behavioral modeling in model building, analysis, pattern mining, anticipation, and prediction. The proceedings from this interdisciplinary workshop provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students from sociology, behavioral and computer science, psychology, cultural study, information systems, and operations research to share results and develop new concepts and methodologies aimed at advancing and deepening our understanding of social and behavioral computing to aid critical decision making.

As computer power grows and data collection technologies advance, a plethora of data is generated in almost every field where computers are used. The com puter generated data should be analyzed by computers; without the aid of computing technologies, it is certain that huge amounts of data collected will not ever be examined, let alone be used to our advantages. Even with today's advanced computer technologies (e. g., machine learning and data mining sys tems), discovering knowledge from data can still be fiendishly hard due to the characteristics of the computer generated data. Taking its simplest form, raw data are represented in feature-values. The size of a dataset can be measUJ.ed in two dimensions, number of features (N) and number of instances (P). Both Nand P can be enormously large. This enormity may cause serious problems to many data mining systems. Feature selection is one of the long existing methods that deal with these problems. Its objective is to select a minimal subset of features according to some reasonable criteria so that the original task can be achieved equally well, if not better. By choosing a minimal subset offeatures, irrelevant and redundant features are removed according to the criterion. When N is reduced, the data space shrinks and in a sense, the data set is now a better representative of the whole data population. If necessary, the reduction of N can also give rise to the reduction of P by eliminating duplicates."

There is a broad interest in feature extraction, construction, and selection among practitioners from statistics, pattern recognition, and data mining to machine learning. Data pre-processing is an essential step in the knowledge discovery process for real-world applications. This book compiles contributions from many leading and active researchers in this growing field and paints a picture of the state-of-the-art techniques that can boost the capabilities of many existing data mining tools. The objective of this collection is to increase the awareness of the data mining community about research into feature extraction, construction and selection, which are currently conducted mainly in isolation. This book is part of an endeavor to produce a contemporary overview of modern solutions, to create synergy among these seemingly different branches, and to pave the way for developing meta-systems and novel approaches. The book can be used by researchers and graduate students in machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery, who wish to understand techniques of feature extraction, construction and selection for data pre-processing and to solve large size, real-world problems. The book can also serve as a reference work for those who are conducting research into feature extraction, construction and selection, and are ready to meet the exciting challenges ahead of us.

The ability to analyze and understand massive data sets lags far behind the ability to gather and store the data. To meet this challenge, knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) is growing rapidly as an emerging field. However, no matter how powerful computers are now or will be in the future, KDD researchers and practitioners must consider how to manage ever-growing data which is, ironically, due to the extensive use of computers and ease of data collection with computers. Many different approaches have been used to address the data explosion issue, such as algorithm scale-up and data reduction. Instance, example, or tuple selection pertains to methods or algorithms that select or search for a representative portion of data that can fulfill a KDD task as if the whole data is used. Instance selection is directly related to data reduction and becomes increasingly important in many KDD applications due to the need for processing efficiency and/or storage efficiency. One of the major means of instance selection is sampling whereby a sample is selected for testing and analysis, and randomness is a key element in the process. Instance selection also covers methods that require search. Examples can be found in density estimation (finding the representative instances - data points - for a cluster); boundary hunting (finding the critical instances to form boundaries to differentiate data points of different classes); and data squashing (producing weighted new data with equivalent sufficient statistics). Other important issues related to instance selection extend to unwanted precision, focusing, concept drifts, noise/outlier removal, data smoothing, etc. Instance Selection and Construction for Data Mining brings researchers and practitioners together to report new developments and applications, to share hard-learned experiences in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and to shed light on the future development of instance selection. This volume serves as a comprehensive reference for graduate students, practitioners and researchers in KDD.

Feature engineering plays a vital role in big data analytics. Machine learning and data mining algorithms cannot work without data. Little can be achieved if there are few features to represent the underlying data objects, and the quality of results of those algorithms largely depends on the quality of the available features. Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics provides a comprehensive introduction to feature engineering, including feature generation, feature extraction, feature transformation, feature selection, and feature analysis and evaluation. The book presents key concepts, methods, examples, and applications, as well as chapters on feature engineering for major data types such as texts, images, sequences, time series, graphs, streaming data, software engineering data, Twitter data, and social media data. It also contains generic feature generation approaches, as well as methods for generating tried-and-tested, hand-crafted, domain-specific features. The first chapter defines the concepts of features and feature engineering, offers an overview of the book, and provides pointers to topics not covered in this book. The next six chapters are devoted to feature engineering, including feature generation for specific data types. The subsequent four chapters cover generic approaches for feature engineering, namely feature selection, feature transformation based feature engineering, deep learning based feature engineering, and pattern based feature generation and engineering. The last three chapters discuss feature engineering for social bot detection, software management, and Twitter-based applications respectively. This book can be used as a reference for data analysts, big data scientists, data preprocessing workers, project managers, project developers, prediction modelers, professors, researchers, graduate students, and upper level undergraduate students. It can also be used as the primary text for courses on feature engineering, or as a supplement for courses on machine learning, data mining, and big data analytics.

Spectral Feature Selection for Data Mining introduces a novel feature selection technique that establishes a general platform for studying existing feature selection algorithms and developing new algorithms for emerging problems in real-world applications. This technique represents a unified framework for supervised, unsupervised, and semisupervised feature selection. The book explores the latest research achievements, sheds light on new research directions, and stimulates readers to make the next creative breakthroughs. It presents the intrinsic ideas behind spectral feature selection, its theoretical foundations, its connections to other algorithms, and its use in handling both large-scale data sets and small sample problems. The authors also cover feature selection and feature extraction, including basic concepts, popular existing algorithms, and applications. A timely introduction to spectral feature selection, this book illustrates the potential of this powerful dimensionality reduction technique in high-dimensional data processing. Readers learn how to use spectral feature selection to solve challenging problems in real-life applications and discover how general feature selection and extraction are connected to spectral feature selection.

Spectral Feature Selection for Data Mining introduces a novel feature selection technique that establishes a general platform for studying existing feature selection algorithms and developing new algorithms for emerging problems in real-world applications. This technique represents a unified framework for supervised, unsupervised, and semisupervised feature selection. The book explores the latest research achievements, sheds light on new research directions, and stimulates readers to make the next creative breakthroughs. It presents the intrinsic ideas behind spectral feature selection, its theoretical foundations, its connections to other algorithms, and its use in handling both large-scale data sets and small sample problems. The authors also cover feature selection and feature extraction, including basic concepts, popular existing algorithms, and applications. A timely introduction to spectral feature selection, this book illustrates the potential of this powerful dimensionality reduction technique in high-dimensional data processing. Readers learn how to use spectral feature selection to solve challenging problems in real-life applications and discover how general feature selection and extraction are connected to spectral feature selection.

This book serves as a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains. The contributors to this volume describe the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. This edited volume will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals working on disinformation, misinformation and fake news in social media from a unique lens.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 6th National Conference of Social Media Processing, SMP 2017, held in Beijing, China, in September 2017. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. The papers address issues such as: knowledge discovery for data; natural language processing; text mining and sentiment analysis; social network analysis and social computing.

Social media greatly enables people to participate in online activities and shatters the barrier for online users to create and share information at any place at any time. However, the explosion of user-generated content poses novel challenges for online users to find relevant information, or, in other words, exacerbates the information overload problem. On the other hand, the quality of user-generated content can vary dramatically from excellence to abuse or spam, resulting in a problem of information credibility. The study and understanding of trust can lead to an effective approach to addressing both information overload and credibility problems. Trust refers to a relationship between a trustor (the subject that trusts a target entity) and a trustee (the entity that is trusted). In the context of social media, trust provides evidence about with whom we can trust to share information and from whom we can accept information without additional verification. With trust, we make the mental shortcut by directly seeking information from trustees or trusted entities, which serves a two-fold purpose: without being overwhelmed by excessive information (i.e., mitigated information overload) and with credible information due to the trust placed on the information provider (i.e., increased information credibility). Therefore, trust is crucial in helping social media users collect relevant and reliable information, and trust in social media is a research topic of increasing importance and of practical significance. This book takes a computational perspective to offer an overview of characteristics and elements of trust and illuminate a wide range of computational tasks of trust. It introduces basic concepts, deliberates challenges and opportunities, reviews state-of-the-art algorithms, and elaborates effective evaluation methods in the trust study. In particular, we illustrate properties and representation models of trust, elucidate trust prediction with representative algorithms, and demonstrate real-world applications where trust is explicitly used. As a new dimension of the trust study, we discuss the concept of distrust and its roles in trust computing.

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth of location-based social networking services, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, which have attracted an increasing number of users and greatly enriched their urban experience. Typical location-based social networking sites allow a user to "check in" at a real-world POI (point of interest, e.g., a hotel, restaurant, theater, etc.), leave tips toward the POI, and share the check-in with their online friends. The check-in action bridges the gap between real world and online social networks, resulting in a new type of social networks, namely location-based social networks (LBSNs). Compared to traditional GPS data, location-based social networks data contains unique properties with abundant heterogeneous information to reveal human mobility, i.e., "when and where a user (who) has been to for what," corresponding to an unprecedented opportunity to better understand human mobility from spatial, temporal, social, and content aspects. The mining and understanding of human mobility can further lead to effective approaches to improve current location-based services from mobile marketing to recommender systems, providing users more convenient life experience than before. This book takes a data mining perspective to offer an overview of studying human mobility in location-based social networks and illuminate a wide range of related computational tasks. It introduces basic concepts, elaborates associated challenges, reviews state-of-the-art algorithms with illustrative examples and real-world LBSN datasets, and discusses effective evaluation methods in mining human mobility. In particular, we illustrate unique characteristics and research opportunities of LBSN data, present representative tasks of mining human mobility on location-based social networks, including capturing user mobility patterns to understand when and where a user commonly goes (location prediction), and exploiting user preferences and location profiles to investigate where and when a user wants to explore (location recommendation), along with studying a user's check-in activity in terms of why a user goes to a certain location.

This brief provides methods for harnessing Twitter data to discover solutions to complex inquiries. The brief introduces the process of collecting data through Twitter s APIs and offers strategies for curating large datasets. The text gives examples of Twitter data with real-world examples, the present challenges and complexities of building visual analytic tools, and the best strategies to address these issues. Examples demonstrate how powerful measures can be computed using various Twitter data sources. Due to its openness in sharing data, Twitter is a prime example of social media in which researchers can verify their hypotheses, and practitioners can mine interesting patterns and build their own applications. This brief is designed to provide researchers, practitioners, project managers, as well as graduate students with an entry point to jump start their Twitter endeavors. It also serves as a convenient reference for readers seasoned in Twitter data analysis."

Social media shatters the barrier to communicate anytime anywhere for people of all walks of life. The publicly available, virtually free information in social media poses a new challenge to consumers who have to discern whether a piece of information published in social media is reliable. For example, it can be difficult to understand the motivations behind a statement passed from one user to another, without knowing the person who originated the message. Additionally, false information can be propagated through social media, resulting in embarrassment or irreversible damages. Provenance data associated with a social media statement can help dispel rumors, clarify opinions, and confirm facts. However, provenance data about social media statements is not readily available to users today. Currently, providing this data to users requires changing the social media infrastructure or offering subscription services. Taking advantage of social media features, research in this nascent field spearheads the search for a way to provide provenance data to social media users, thus leveraging social media itself by mining it for the provenance data. Searching for provenance data reveals an interesting problem space requiring the development and application of new metrics in order to provide meaningful provenance data to social media users. This lecture reviews the current research on information provenance, explores exciting research opportunities to address pressing needs, and shows how data mining can enable a social media user to make informed judgements about statements published in social media. Table of Contents: Information Provenance in Social Media / Provenance Attributes / Provenance via Network Information / Provenance Data

As computer power grows and data collection technologies advance, a plethora of data is generated in almost every field where computers are used. The com puter generated data should be analyzed by computers; without the aid of computing technologies, it is certain that huge amounts of data collected will not ever be examined, let alone be used to our advantages. Even with today's advanced computer technologies (e. g. , machine learning and data mining sys tems), discovering knowledge from data can still be fiendishly hard due to the characteristics of the computer generated data. Taking its simplest form, raw data are represented in feature-values. The size of a dataset can be measUJ*ed in two dimensions, number of features (N) and number of instances (P). Both Nand P can be enormously large. This enormity may cause serious problems to many data mining systems. Feature selection is one of the long existing methods that deal with these problems. Its objective is to select a minimal subset of features according to some reasonable criteria so that the original task can be achieved equally well, if not better. By choosing a minimal subset offeatures, irrelevant and redundant features are removed according to the criterion. When N is reduced, the data space shrinks and in a sense, the data set is now a better representative of the whole data population. If necessary, the reduction of N can also give rise to the reduction of P by eliminating duplicates.

There is broad interest in feature extraction, construction, and selection among practitioners from statistics, pattern recognition, and data mining to machine learning. Data preprocessing is an essential step in the knowledge discovery process for real-world applications. This book compiles contributions from many leading and active researchers in this growing field and paints a picture of the state-of-art techniques that can boost the capabilities of many existing data mining tools. The objective of this collection is to increase the awareness of the data mining community about the research of feature extraction, construction and selection, which are currently conducted mainly in isolation. This book is part of our endeavor to produce a contemporary overview of modern solutions, to create synergy among these seemingly different branches, and to pave the way for developing meta-systems and novel approaches. Even with today's advanced computer technologies, discovering knowledge from data can still be fiendishly hard due to the characteristics of the computer generated data. Feature extraction, construction and selection are a set of techniques that transform and simplify data so as to make data mining tasks easier. Feature construction and selection can be viewed as two sides of the representation problem.

The ability to analyze and understand massive data sets lags far behind the ability to gather and store the data. To meet this challenge, knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) is growing rapidly as an emerging field. However, no matter how powerful computers are now or will be in the future, KDD researchers and practitioners must consider how to manage ever-growing data which is, ironically, due to the extensive use of computers and ease of data collection with computers. Many different approaches have been used to address the data explosion issue, such as algorithm scale-up and data reduction. Instance, example, or tuple selection pertains to methods or algorithms that select or search for a representative portion of data that can fulfill a KDD task as if the whole data is used. Instance selection is directly related to data reduction and becomes increasingly important in many KDD applications due to the need for processing efficiency and/or storage efficiency. One of the major means of instance selection is sampling whereby a sample is selected for testing and analysis, and randomness is a key element in the process. Instance selection also covers methods that require search. Examples can be found in density estimation (finding the representative instances - data points - for a cluster); boundary hunting (finding the critical instances to form boundaries to differentiate data points of different classes); and data squashing (producing weighted new data with equivalent sufficient statistics). Other important issues related to instance selection extend to unwanted precision, focusing, concept drifts, noise/outlier removal, data smoothing, etc. Instance Selection and Construction for Data Mining brings researchers and practitioners together to report new developments and applications, to share hard-learned experiences in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and to shed light on the future development of instance selection. This volume serves as a comprehensive reference for graduate students, practitioners and researchers in KDD.

Social computing concerns the study of social behavior and context based on computational systems. Behavioral modeling reproduces the social behavior, and allows for experimenting with and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes. The pervasive use of computer and Internet technologies provides an unprecedented environment where people can share opinions and experiences, offer suggestions and advice, debate, and even conduct experiments. Social computing facilitates behavioral modeling in model building, analysis, pattern mining, anticipation, and prediction. The proceedings from this interdisciplinary workshop provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students from sociology, behavioral and computer science, psychology, cultural study, information systems, and operations research to share results and develop new concepts and methodologies aimed at advancing and deepening our understanding of social and behavioral computing to aid critical decision making.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the various concepts and research issues about blogs or weblogs. It introduces techniques and approaches, tools and applications, and evaluation methodologies with examples and case studies. Blogs allow people to express their thoughts, voice their opinions, and share their experiences and ideas. Blogs also facilitate interactions among individuals creating a network with unique characteristics. Through the interactions individuals experience a sense of community. We elaborate on approaches that extract communities and cluster blogs based on information of the bloggers. Open standards and low barrier to publication in Blogosphere have transformed information consumers to producers, generating an overwhelming amount of ever-increasing knowledge about the members, their environment and symbiosis. We elaborate on approaches that sift through humongous blog data sources to identify influential and trustworthy bloggers leveraging content and network information. Spam blogs or "splogs" are an increasing concern in Blogosphere and are discussed in detail with the approaches leveraging supervised machine learning algorithms and interaction patterns. We elaborate on data collection procedures, provide resources for blog data repositories, mention various visualization and analysis tools in Blogosphere, and explain conventional and novel evaluation methodologies, to help perform research in the Blogosphere. The book is supported by additional material, including lecture slides as well as the complete set of figures used in the book, and the reader is encouraged to visit the book website for the latest information. Table of Contents: Modeling Blogosphere / Blog Clustering and Community Discovery / Influence and Trust / Spam Filtering in Blogosphere / Data Collection and Evaluation

The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is a leading international conference in the area of data mining and knowledge discovery. It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific discovery, data visualization, causality induction, and knowledge-based systems. This year s conference (PAKDD 2005) was the ninth of the PAKDD series, and carried the tradition in providing high-quality technical programs to facilitate research in knowledge discovery and data mining. It was held in Hanoi, Vietnam at the Melia Hotel, 18 20 May 2005. We are pleased to provide some statistics about PAKDD 2005. This year we received 327 submissions (a 37% increase over PAKDD 2004), which is the highest number of submissions since the first PAKDD in 1997) from 28 countries/regions: Australia (33), Austria (1), Belgium (2), Canada (11), China (91), Switzerland (2), France (9), Finland (1), Germany (5), Hong Kong (11), Indonesia (1), India (2), Italy (2), Japan (21), Korea (51), Malaysia (1), Macau (1), New Zealand (3), Poland (4), Pakistan (1), Portugal (3), Singapore (12), Taiwan (19), Thailand (7), Tunisia (2), UK (5), USA (31), and Vietnam (9). The submitted papers went through a rigorous reviewing process. Each submission was reviewed by at least two reviewers, and most of them by three or four reviewers."

The Fourth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2000) was held at the Keihanna-Plaza, Kyoto, Japan, April 18 - 20, 2000. PAKDD 2000 provided an international forum for researchers and applica tion developers to share their original research results and practical development experiences. A wide range of current KDD topics were covered including ma chine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition, data visualization, knowledge-based systems, soft computing, and high performance computing. It followed the success of PAKDD 97 in Singapore, PAKDD 98 in Austraha, and PAKDD 99 in China by bringing together participants from universities, indus try, and government from all over the world to exchange problems and challenges and to disseminate the recently developed KDD techniques. This PAKDD 2000 proceedings volume addresses both current issues and novel approaches in regards to theory, methodology, and real world application. The technical sessions were organized according to subtopics such as Data Mining Theory, Feature Selection and Transformation, Clustering, Application of Data Mining, Association Rules, Induction, Text Mining, Web and Graph Mining. Of the 116 worldwide submissions, 33 regular papers and 16 short papers were accepted for presentation at the conference and included in this volume. Each submission was critically reviewed by two to four program committee members based on their relevance, originality, quality, and clarity."

Feature engineering plays a vital role in big data analytics. Machine learning and data mining algorithms cannot work without data. Little can be achieved if there are few features to represent the underlying data objects, and the quality of results of those algorithms largely depends on the quality of the available features. Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics provides a comprehensive introduction to feature engineering, including feature generation, feature extraction, feature transformation, feature selection, and feature analysis and evaluation. The book presents key concepts, methods, examples, and applications, as well as chapters on feature engineering for major data types such as texts, images, sequences, time series, graphs, streaming data, software engineering data, Twitter data, and social media data. It also contains generic feature generation approaches, as well as methods for generating tried-and-tested, hand-crafted, domain-specific features. The first chapter defines the concepts of features and feature engineering, offers an overview of the book, and provides pointers to topics not covered in this book. The next six chapters are devoted to feature engineering, including feature generation for specific data types. The subsequent four chapters cover generic approaches for feature engineering, namely feature selection, feature transformation based feature engineering, deep learning based feature engineering, and pattern based feature generation and engineering. The last three chapters discuss feature engineering for social bot detection, software management, and Twitter-based applications respectively. This book can be used as a reference for data analysts, big data scientists, data preprocessing workers, project managers, project developers, prediction modelers, professors, researchers, graduate students, and upper level undergraduate students. It can also be used as the primary text for courses on feature engineering, or as a supplement for courses on machine learning, data mining, and big data analytics.

Due to increasing demands for dimensionality reduction, research on feature selection has deeply and widely expanded into many fields, including computational statistics, pattern recognition, machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery. Highlighting current research issues, Computational Methods of Feature Selection introduces the basic concepts and principles, state-of-the-art algorithms, and novel applications of this tool.

The book begins by exploring unsupervised, randomized, and causal feature selection. It then reports on some recent results of empowering feature selection, including active feature selection, decision-border estimate, the use of ensembles with independent probes, and incremental feature selection. This is followed by discussions of weighting and local methods, such as the ReliefF family, "k"-means clustering, local feature relevance, and a new interpretation of Relief. The book subsequently covers text classification, a new feature selection score, and both constraint-guided and aggressive feature selection. The final section examines applications of feature selection in bioinformatics, including feature construction as well as redundancy-, ensemble-, and penalty-based feature selection.

Through a clear, concise, and coherent presentation of topics, this volume systematically covers the key concepts, underlying principles, and inventive applications of feature selection, illustrating how this powerful tool can efficiently harness massive, high-dimensional data and turn it into valuable, reliable information.

The growth of social media over the last decade has revolutionized the way individuals interact and industries conduct business. Individuals produce data at an unprecedented rate by interacting, sharing, and consuming content through social media. Understanding and processing this new type of data to glean actionable patterns presents challenges and opportunities for interdisciplinary research, novel algorithms, and tool development. Social Media Mining integrates social media, social network analysis, and data mining to provide a convenient and coherent platform for students, practitioners, researchers, and project managers to understand the basics and potentials of social media mining. It introduces the unique problems arising from social media data and presents fundamental concepts, emerging issues, and effective algorithms for network analysis and data mining. Suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses as well as professional short courses, the text contains exercises of different degrees of difficulty that improve understanding and help apply concepts, principles, and methods in various scenarios of social media mining.