This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access

Predicting Influential Blogger's by a novel,

hybrid and optimized Case Based Reasoning
approach with Balanced Random Forest using
Imbalanced data
Yousra Asim1, Ahmad Kamran Malik1,*, Basit Raza1, Ahmad R Shahaid1, Nafees Qamar2
1Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad,45550, Pakistan.
2Department of Health Administration, Governors State University, Illinois 60484, United States
*Corresponding author: Ahmad Kamran Malik (ahmad.kamran@comsats.edu.pk)

This research was supported in part by the Department of Health Administration, Governors State University, USA. This study is also
supported by COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad, Pakistan, under research productivity funds CUI/ORIC-PD/20.

ABSTRACT

Bloggers possess the capability of understanding and influencing mass psychology to a wide community of
fans and followers by posting their online valuable content. Their dominance over audience can be used as
a helping hand in the corporate world which desires to disseminate their product or services among
diversified people belonging to varying localities, and is always on the lookout for suitable and quick ways
to grasp public access. Due to this reason, influential bloggers are preferred in the online market to initiate
marketing campaigns which is a thought-provoking task due to loads of blogger communities. The novelty
of this paper lies in the proposed Framework for Influential Blogger Prediction based on Blogger and Blog
Features (IBP-BBF) using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) which is not only capable of handling labeled data
but also unstructured data (blogs) and imbalanced data in an optimized way. Detailed labelled and
unstructured data are collected by online survey of 129 bloggers and text mining of their 32,200 blogs
respectively. The classification results are compared and validated with state-of-the-art machine learning
techniques by using standard evaluation measures respectively in the context of imbalanced data. The
results show that the proposed IBP-BBF framework through CBR modeling outperforms existing
techniques in classifying and adapting the influential blogger prediction. The IBP-BBF framework
performed better as compared to baseline imbalanced data classification techniques. It is found that the
Balanced Random Forest contributes towards the performance of CBR approach than Balanced Bagging
Classifier and RUSBoost classifier. By using the CBR approach, baseline techniques can be optimized for
influential blogger identification in a better way.

INDEX TERMS: Blogger Classification, Case Based Reasoning (CBR), Machine Learning (ML), Imbalanced data, Text
Mining

I. INTRODUCTION
People belonging to diverse backgrounds, breathing in
differing geographical zones come together to interact and
share on online social networks (OSNs) [1]. Some of these
users become bloggers and start sharing their ideas with the
rest of the OSN users. They gain gradual increase in
followers based on the quality of content that they present.
They encourage their followers to participate and indulge in
their blogs. Some of the bloggers gain more popularity than
the others due to various reasons, for example the better
quality of their content, the wider range of impact that their
videos make, their general appeal, and more concise style of
presentation etc. These bloggers with a wide range of
influence are called influential nodes. Their influence is used
by corporate companies for viral marketing and information
flow [4], targeted marketing [5], propagation of brand
information [2], influence maximization [3], and many other
purposes as highlighted in [4] .

VOLUME XX, 2017 1

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Such influential nodes exert a subtle yet powerful impact
on the psychology of their followers [5]. The corporate
companies can make use of this impact for their own benefit,
thereby attracting customers for their particular brand [6].
Due to dynamic nature of OSNs, it becomes quite a task for
any company to hire the most suitable and skilled an
influential node such as blogger [7]. It also requires an
understanding of the blogging world and an uncanny skill in
identifying professional VS amateur bloggers. No doubt a
professional blogger can prove way more valuable in
reaching out to the masses than an amateur novice [8].
As the community of bloggers in OSN has expanded due
to the perpetually growing activity of blogging, therefore, it
has become inconvenient to find the impact of various
bloggers in huge online blogger’s community and to identify
influential bloggers amongst them. Although, there exists
some other relevant challenges in this perspective as
mentioned by authors namely, quantity measure of influence,
lack of ground truth, temporal aspects of blogging platform,
missing links in bloggers datasets, identification of consistent
and active bloggers [9]. However, in this research work, we
are only interested in the identification of such influential
bloggers who opt blogging as their profession (such as
professional bloggers or otherwise).
Previously, the relevant studies have widely focused on
Network-based models, Feature based models (using features
against blog posts such as number of likes or comments etc.)
to identify influential bloggers [9, 10], and on a few ML
techniques (based on blogger’s features) [11-13] for blogger
classification into professional or non-professional. This
study is focused on the latter only. Furthermore, authors have
tried to identify the factors (important features) affecting
blogging behavior of a blogger [12, 14-16] based on
questionnaires. Also, blog content features has been
examined for several purposes such as content analysis,
opinion mining etc. [17], however, we are only interested in
identifying influential bloggers in this context. Authors have
also used blogger features along with blog content features in
the context of influential blogger prediction [18].
During a comprehensive analysis of the literature, we
observed that previously used Machine Learning (ML)
techniques for blogger classification are not adaptive [11-13,
18] which makes them incapable for automatic identification
of unseen influential bloggers with varying input features and
previously unobserved blogger instances. Most of them
construct general and explicit description of a target concept
(global approximations) based on the blogger’s training data,
which decreases their problem solving capability with each
newly presented blogger instance leading to poor
performance of a classifier. Though, the number of factors
that affect the blogging behavior of a blogger is not limited
[12, 14-16], however, existing predictive models [11-13]
have not considered the handling of varying features of
unseen bloggers and their blogs. Besides, there is a room for
improvement in their performance measures for blogger
2 VOLUME XX, 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
classification. Furthermore, the construction of ontologies by
using blog content in [18] can suffer from contradictions and
misinterpretations of target concept due to blog’s
unstructured nature eventually compromising the
performance of a classifier. Without handling such issues,
influential blogger cannot be identified correctly to design an
adaptive prediction framework which can promote
companies in today’s e-business environment.
The main objective of this research is to model, develop,
and implement an adaptive framework for the identification
of influential bloggers by using blogger features and blog
content features which can boost prediction results. It is an
effort which extends our previous investigations [19-21] in
this domain. This work can be differentiated with respect to
the prior works by incorporating unstructured data handling
along with labeled data in the suggested framework, provided
the data is imbalanced. Also, the investigation in the context
of imbalanced data classification entirely moved us towards a
different view of the prescribed problem in terms of
imbalanced data classification techniques and performance
measures, where imbalanced data problem indicates that
important cases (positive instances of target output class) are
few or rare in the training dataset [22, 23]. In other words, if
the instances of one output class are lesser as compared to
other output class, then it denotes the dataset is imbalanced in
the case of binary classification problem [24]. It can lead to
the worst performance of standard classifiers because they
assume balanced class distributions in the dataset which is
not true in the case of imbalanced data. Such data consists of
underrepresented data which requires new tools and
algorithms to process raw data into useful knowledge
representation and to learn patterns in data [25]. Authors
have suggested a measure namely Imbalanced Ratio (IR) to
calculate the distribution of instances provided the data is an
imbalanced binary dataset [26]. It can be calculated by
dividing the number of majority instance by number of
minority instances in a dataset. Once IR’s value is
determined, then imbalanced dataset can be categorized into
low imbalanced (if IR’s value lies within 1.5 and 3), medium
imbalanced (if the value of IR lies within 3 and 9) , and high
imbalance datasets (if IR exceeds 9) [27].
In addition, the inclusion of adaptive capability in the
proposed framework, that is, one of the autonomic
characteristics of an algorithm gives its strength to work
independently where human need is minimized and adaptive
behavior is managed [28]. Autonomous systems (AS) handle
unseen situations in a natural way just like humans who live
in a changing environment in their whole lives where they
have to handle unpredictable and unseen situations. The shift
in a human experience brings with it a shift in his/her
perspective, attitudes, likes/dislikes, and problem solving
skills. An AS exhibits a variety of characteristics that enable
it to wisely manage random situations. Such systems can
solve a problem after going through a learning process. They
can adapt over time to the changing trends through a process
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
of self-* properties such as self monitoring, self prediction,
self-evaluation, self-correction and self adaptation [29].
In this work, Case-based Reasoning (CBR) modeling
incorporates a few characteristics of AS for the classification
task. Conversely, traditional machine learning techniques opt
for building an explicit model with no adaptation to suggest
the solutions to unseen problems which is the reason behind
their incapability in holding autonomic properties.
Previously, CBR have been successfully investigated as an
option to design systems with self management
characteristics [28, 30]. Although we are not going to
propose a complete AS but a classifier with a few AS
properties. For this purpose, we assume that adaptation based
on CBR can be suitable for the proposed prediction
framework for the identification of influential blogger.
Furthermore, this study is using a hybrid research design
(quantitative as well as experimental). In quantitative
research, surveys are thought out as the best way to collect a
large amount of data from a large number of people in a short
amount of time [31]. In this research, the collection of
survey-based dataset is crucial due to unavailability of the
dataset required to understand the features of a blogger as
well as his blogging simultaneously for the identification of a
blogger’s influence. This collection of data from online
bloggers for the evaluation of the proposed framework makes
this research design based on a survey. We have used the
internet for performing online data collection due to its low
cost and larger sampling frame than other data gathering
techniques. Furthermore, the investigation of the existing
state of art machine learning techniques for imbalanced data
that can perform well for influential blogger classification
and use of standard performance measures such as
Specificity, F-measure, Geometric Mean, and ROC area
under the curve to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed
framework make this work an experimental research design.
This work theoretically and practically contributes by
proposing and implementing an adaptive Framework for
Influential Blogger Prediction based on Blogger and Blog
Features (IBP-BBF) using CBR for the influential blogger’s
classification. Ìt is a classifier which partially holds some
characteristics of an AS such as self-prediction and self
adaptation. It can not only identify the most influential
bloggers based on their features, but also consists of a such
capability through which changing aptitudes of the bloggers
can be monitored and identified. It is capable of devising
solutions in unseen situations without any human help. It can
update itself according to future data for improvement of its
performance. Additionally, it can handle imbalanced data in
an efficient way as compared to other under-investigation
baseline methods. Likewise, the CBR approach can
positively enhance the classification capabilities of baseline
methods is another theoretical contribution to the existing
body of knowledge which is also found consistent with our
prior research outcomes [19].
2 VOLUME XX, 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
The paper is organized as follows. Section II represents the
previous related work in the domain of influential blogger
identification. Section III provides the complete
methodology, including dataset collection and description,
baseline methods used for comparison, standard evaluation
metrics used for results evaluation. Section IV offers the
proposed IBP-BBF framework for influential blogger
identification. Section V describes results and discussion.
Additionally, it provides insight to proof of concept and
Section VI concludes this study.
II. RELATED WORK
In this section, a preview of preceding closely connected
studies is offered for the identification of influential bloggers.
The existing models are classified into Network-based
models and Feature-based models [9, 10]. The aforesaid
models are capable of finding the influential blogger by using
different network centrality measures and use the
connections between the users. In contrast, the subsequent
models calculate the influence of a blog directly by analyzing
the attributes of blog posts such as comments received, the
length of a blog post, number of references used in a blog
post, significance of blog website where the blog has been
posted etc., which contributes towards his/her influence
indirectly. What’s more, such models are further grouped
into temporal and non temporal feature based models where
the former models have also considered the recentness of
blog post features for the influential blogger identification.
On the other hand, the latter models have ignored the recency
of under consideration features. However, this research work
is not examining network structure or blog post features to
find influential bloggers.
Besides, a few studies have identified the influential
bloggers by using labeled data. They performed classification
by using a few ML techniques, implemented in weka tool on
the standard BLOGGER dataset collected by [12] . After
collection of dataset, the authors used C4.5 decision tree
algorithm which has obtained 82% accuracy for blogger
classification. They have discussed factors contributing
towards professionalism of a blogger, but without results
validation. Apart from this, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are used and achieved
84% and 90% accuracy respectively. Further, Random Forest
(RF) classifier is used to compare results with C4.5 and KNN
algorithm in [11, 12] which provided 8% gain in accuracy
without cross validation [13]. Although these studies have
done an experimental evaluation of a few ML techniques for
blogger classification, but they have ignored the standard
practice of verifying results by using k-fold cross validation
which is necessary to estimate the skill of a trained ML
model for unseen future predictions. Similarly, being unable
to provide generalized results, they have also ignored the
unstructured data for finding the influential bloggers. Also,
these studies are incapable of proposing any new method in
this problem domain.
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
To overcome this preceding research gap, [20] was an
initiative in this problem domain. By using a number of ML
techniques, they have observed 85% accuracy gain for
blogger classification by using RF classifier and Nearest
Neighbor classifier along with standard way of cross
validation. In this chain of experiments, 2% gain in accuracy
is grasped with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) [21]. After
investigating already available ML techniques on a number
of standard datasets and highlighting a few among them for
better blogger classification, a new classifier named
Influential Blogger based Case-Based Reasoning (IB-CBR)
is offered with adaptive capabilities [19]. It iteratively
outperformed relevant previously used techniques in terms of
standard performance measures and achieved 95% accuracy,
97% True Positive Rate, 11% False Positive rate, 96% F-
measure, 98% ROC area under the curve in third iteration.
In addition, authors have presented some context-specific
works in this domain. For instance, a dataset of fashion
bloggers belonging to Spain is collected to find influential
bloggers among them. They concluded that influential
bloggers keep their blogs updated, actively participate in
online social circles, contribute in organizing fashion events
with media and habitual in reading fashion magazines [32].
A weibo platform-dependant framework is offered for
information spread by finding influential bloggers. Authors
extract all blogs of pre-selected keywords from weibo via
web-crawler and collect blogger’s information (such as their
sex, number of followers/followees, number of
tweets/retweets, and type of a blogger) to find out their
influence as an opinion leader [18]. They construct two
directed graphs of blog post-repost relationship and blogger
post-repost relationship respectively for this purpose and
used them for information diffusion. However, our work
focuses on suggesting a classifier without using network
structure and without focusing any specific platform. Also,
they are not handling data imbalanced problem. We are
working on traditional blogs as well as microblogs instead of
only using the latter which shows that this work is not
blogging platform dependent. Moreover, instead of building
ontologies, we used ML techniques for blogger classification.
Although previously, identification of influential blogger is
carried out using aforesaid methodologies but it is observed
that there is absence of such work which can handle labeled
as well as unstructured data by using ML techniques
simultaneously.
As far as the studies related to blog mining (unstructured
data pattern extraction) are concerned, a very recent study
has provided insights of the literature in this context so far
[17]. As an illustration, the former studies have followed a
qualitative approach for blog content analysis based on the
gender and language to find out the participation of bloggers
in blogging. Further, as discussed before, authors have
examined metadata (features) of blogs such as a blog author,
blog’s published date and time, a blog’s length etc. It is also
stated that recent studies in this domain focus on news-
2 VOLUME XX, 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
related content and micro-blogging. Different studies are
conducted to identify the latest trends/topics in blogging by
investigating the evolving blogging content with the passage
of time. Researchers are found interested in several methods
such as classification, clustering, sentiment analysis, time
series, etc. The former blog mining studies have used
dimensionality reduction methods such as spectral
dimensionality reduction techniques for mono or bi-
directional blog data. Different studies have used non-linear
dimension reduction techniques, but focus on a specific type
of blogs such as business blogs. Several solutions in blog
mining are static and incapable of handling dynamic,
complex, and huge blog data [17]. It indicates that in spite of
a number of studies relevant to influential blogger
identification (by using labeled data) and several blog mining
studies, there is still a need of such adaptive framework
which is capable of handling both labeled as well as
unstructured (blog text) data simultaneously. Also, such
framework should have the prediction capabilities in an
efficient manner in the case of unseen scenarios without
human intervention.
III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
In this work, a dataset is collected from Facebook and
Instagram based online bloggers by collecting their responses
through an online questionnaire. The obtained data from
blogger responses has 35 input features (i.e. answers of 35
questions) and have one binary target output such as
professional/non-professional blogger (as mentioned by the
blogger himself/herself). There are 37 positive instances
(professional bloggers) and 92 negative instances (non-
professional bloggers). The value of IR which is calculated
by 37/92= 2.5, indicates that the extracted dataset is a
medium imbalanced. We extracted the given bloggers URLs
from the dataset on which participants (bloggers) post their
blogs. Afterwards, we extracted total 32,200 blogs from their
given URLs. Blogs dataset comprises of 13,751 blogs from
Instagram and 18,449 from other blogging platforms such as
Blogspot and WordPress. Details of blog extraction can be
seen in the Section IV. Further, we selected the blogs of
those categories in which the blogs of both professional as
well as non-professional bloggers were present. There were
six categories having both types of bloggers, namely
Activities, private thoughts and reflections, Human rights
issues and development, Self experiences, Toursim, Business
and digital marketing, and Poetry, literature and art (Details
are shown in Table 3). We labeled the features of these blogs
as a professional blogger or otherwise according to obtained
responses. The selected categories comprise of total 6,037
blogs having 1,483 blogs of professional bloggers and 4,554
blogs of non-professional bloggers (results in
IR=4,554/1,483=3.07), which shows a medium imbalanced
dataset in the case of unstructured data as well. This way, we
used labeled as well as unstructured data for experimental
analysis.
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
TABLE 1. Demographic details of participants (Bloggers)
Gender Marital status Religion Education/Degree
Male (51.2%) Single (65.1%) Atheist (3.1%) School Education
Female (48.8%) Married (25.58%) Christian (10.07%) (15.55%)
Engaged/In a Hindu (11.6%) Bachelor (51.93%)
Relationship Muslim (72.09%) Master (26.35%)
(7.75%) Prefer Not to Say Ph.D. (2.3%)
Prefer Not to say (3.1%) Technical
(1.5%) Qualification (2.32%)
Did not complete
school education
(0.77%)
Further, we used both types of data (labeled/unstructured) to
evaluate our proposed framework for influential blogger
identification. The efficiency of proposed framework was
investigated by using standard performance measures
commonly used for imbalanced binary classification problem
such as Specificity, F-Measure, Geometric Mean and ROC
area under the curve. Furthermore, the comparative analysis
of results was performed between proposed framework
outputs and state-of-the art ML techniques previously used
for imbalanced dataset classification. Several distance and
similarity measures such as Cosine, Euclidean, Braycurtis,
Canberra, Correlation, Chebyshev, Minkowski, and
CityBlock similarity are used to find the similar cases from
the repository of previous cases with respect to new unseen
cases.
A. DATA COLLECTION
We prepared a questionnaire to conduct a survey of online
bloggers who belongs to Instagram and Facebook platforms.
To achieve the theoretical soundness (validity) of this online
survey, it was prepared by following the research questions
that have already been used in [12, 15, 33]. This dataset is
collected due to following reasons:
Firstly, the relevant standard online dataset (BLOGGER’s
Dataset [12]) is small and we need more data to effectively
evaluate the proposed framework for influential bloggers
classification. Secondly, the studies [15, 33], carried out in
other departments, which have been performed for factor
identification behind the blogging of bloggers have used
questionnaires to collect data from bloggers. They provided
results by using statistical methods. But, unfortunately, the
data collected in these studies are small, and also not
available online.
The survey was posted on aforesaid social network
platforms and responses were being collected. The process of
data collection was initiated on February 20, 2018 and lasted
till February 02, 2019. The collected data consists of 129
bloggers and their 32,200 blogs. In this dataset, the
participants were from different countries, having diverse
religious background and belong to different age-groups,
having varying interests and dissimilar educational
backgrounds. Likewise, their blogging platforms were also
2 VOLUME XX, 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
Age in years (y) Occupation Country
< 20 y (10.01%) Businessman (6.2%) Pakistan
21-25 y (40.3%) Doctor (2.3%) (65.11%)
26-30 y (31.7%) Engineer (6.2%) India (13.95%)
31-35 y (9.3%) Govt. Servant (1.5%) Nigerian (4.65%)
36-40 y (5.4%) Private job (14.7%) American
41-45 y (1.55%) Professional bloggers (2.32%)
> 46 y (1.55%) (24.03%) Filipino (2.30%)
Students (27.13%) U.K. (2.3%)
Teachers (5.42%) U.A.E. (1.5%)
Others (12.40%) Others (6.976%)
different from each other (were not limited to Facebook and
Instagram).
Our dataset consists of 129 bloggers from which 63
(48.8%) were female and 66 (51.2%) were male bloggers.
There were 84 (65.1%) bloggers who are single, 33 (25.58%)
bloggers who are married, and 10 (7.75%) bloggers marital
status was “engaged/in a relationship”. However, 2 (1.5%)
bloggers did not tell about their marital status. Regarding
religion, there were 4 (3.1%) bloggers who were atheist, 13
(10.07%) bloggers were Christian, 15 (11.6%) bloggers were
Hindu, 93 (72.09%) bloggers were Muslim. But, 4 (3.1%)
bloggers hesitated to mention their religion. With respect to
the educational background, there were 67 (51.93%) bloggers
who had done “Bachelor/License”, 34 (26.35%) bloggers
were Master degree holders, 3 (2.3%) bloggers were Ph.D.
degree holders, and 4 (2.32%) bloggers had acquired
technical qualifications. Likewise, 20 (15.55%) bloggers had
completed only school education. On the other hand, there
was only one blogger who had not completed his school
education.
According to age group, 52 (40.3%) bloggers fall in 21-25
years age group, 41 (31.7%) bloggers lies in 26-30 years age
group, 13 (10.01%) of the total were having age less than 20
years, 12 (9.3%) bloggers belong to 31-35 years age group,
7 (5.4%) bloggers belong to 36-40 years age group, 2
bloggers fall in 41-45 years age group. The categories of 46-
50 years and 51 years and above age groups had only one
blogger each. Among participants of survey, there were 8
(6.2%) bloggers who had mentioned their occupation as
“business man”, 3 (2.3%) bloggers were doctors, 8 (6.2%)
bloggers were engineer, 2 (1.5%) bloggers were govt.
servant, 19 (14.7%) bloggers were on private job, 31
(24.03%) participants were only a blogger by profession, 35
(27.13%) bloggers were students, 7 (5.42%) bloggers were
teachers, and 16 (12.40%) bloggers fall in the category of
“others”.The participants of this survey belong to different
countries. Most of them 65.11% (84 bloggers) were
Pakistanis. However, there were 18 (13.95%) bloggers who
belonged to India, 6 (4.65%) bloggers were Nigerian, 4
(2.32%) bloggers were American, 3 (2.3%) bloggers were
Filipino, 3 (2.3%) were U.K. resident, and 2 (1.5%) bloggers
were from the U.A.E. Similarly, among the participants,
there was only one participant from each of the following
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
countries: Afghanistan, Canada, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Mauritius, South Africa, South Arab, and Poland. These
details of the dataset can be seen in Table 1.
B. ALGORITHMS USED FOR COMPARISON
This work has explored the significance of the proposed
framework for influential blogger classification into
professional or otherwise. We have used Balanced Random
Forest (BRF) classifier, Balanced Bagging Classifier (BBC),
and RUSBoost classifier to compare their results against the
the outcomes of the proposed IBP-BBF framework. First,
framework outcomes are evaluated and compared against
algorithms used in [34-36] for imbalanced datasets in binary
classification problem. Additionally, we have examined and
compared the results of previously offered algorithm named
as IB-CBR [19] in our experimental chain in this domain.
The classifiers used for results comparison are briefly
described as follows:
1) BALANCED RANDOM FOREST CLASSIFIER
BRF [34] is an ensemble classifier and generates many
decision trees by picking the number of attributes at random).
It overcomes the deficiency of classic RF which has biased
nature towards majority class for accuracy prediction. In the
case of the extremely imbalanced dataset, it is more likely
that the training set may contain rare instances of minority
class to build decision trees. It can definitely contribute
towards unsatisfactory performance of a classifier for
minority class prediction. Being computationally more
efficient BRF joins random under sampling with the
ensembling idea. At each iteration, it randomly extracts a
training set by under sampling the majority class instances
and selecting same number of minority class instances with
replacement (e.g. using some instances multiple times in
generating a single decision tree). This strategy enables BRF
to opt for the best hypothesis by generating several models
for future prediction along with the balanced training set to
train those models.
2) BALANCED BAGGING CLASSIFIER
It uses random under sampling method to balance the
training set on training time coupled with bagging idea for
making predictions. Just like RF, classic bagging builds
several versions of a base classifier to get final prediction
[35]. However, it uses all features of dataset to split a node
which makes it somehow different from RF. Due to the
comparable working nature of balanced bagging and BRF,
we selected this algorithm in experimental design.
3) RUSBOOST CLASSIFIER
RUSBoost is recommended as an outperforming algorithm
by [36] as compared to Non-ensemble classifiers, Classic
ensembles, Cost-sensitive boosting Ensemble classifiers,
SMOTEBoost, Bagging-based classifiers, and hybrid
ensembles provided the data is imbalanced and have two
output classes. Authors proved it by conducting experiments
on 44 imbalanced standard datasets from KEEL repository.
2 VOLUME XX, 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
The motivations of investigating RUSBoost for professional
blogger classification are its outstanding performance,
simplicity, and less computational cost. This hybrid
algorithm under samples the dataset to reduce the instances
of majority class to balance the dataset at each iteration and
uses AdaBoost.M2 for training purposes [37]. It modifies the
weight distribution of instances after each training of a
classifier which is the essence of diversity in training data to
classify data with more accuracy.
4) IB-CBR CLASSIFIER
An adaptive model named IB-CBR is offered previously
for the identification of influential bloggers [19]. This work
is a hybrid of case-based reasoning and RF. The proposed
automated system is capable of improving its performance
iteratively by depending upon previous experiences. It
outperforms previously highlighted classic ensemble method
such as RF, Non-ensemble methods such as Nearest
Neighbor algorithm and adaptive models such as ANN.
However, the aforementioned competitor algorithms were
the outcomes of extensive experimental studies which show
their outstanding performance over several ML techniques
using multiple standard datasets [20, 21]. In this work, we
shall compare the CBR outcomes with the proposed model in
imbalanced dataset domain.
C. EVALUATION METRICS
Due to imbalanced dataset, we used Precision (Pre), Recall
(Rec), Specificity (Spec), F-measure, Geometric Mean
(G.M.), and ROC area under the curve (ROC AUC) to
produce classification results. The value of these metrics
varies from 0 to 1 where 0 indicates the minimum value
(poor classification) and 1 indicates the maximum value
(excellent classification).
Pre is used to quantify the number of correctly predicted
positive examples by a classifier. It focuses on the accuracy
of minority class which does not affect the true performance
evaluation of a classifier. It is an alternative of classification
accuracy in the case of imbalance data. It can be calculated
by Eq. (1) which is as follows:
𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠
𝑃𝑟𝑒 = (1)
𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 + 𝐹𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠
Pre is not capable of predicting false negatives i.e. how
many positive examples (professional bloggers) are predicted
as negative class examples (non-professional bloggers) by a
classifier. To overcome this deficiency, Rec (sensitivity) is
used which provides an indication of missed positive
instances (professional bloggers) by a classifier. It provides
insight into the coverage of minority class in the case of
imbalanced datasets. It supports to figure out the ratio of
those professional bloggers that are perceived as non-
professional bloggers by the framework. It is calculated by
the following Eq. (2).
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 Spec (True Negative Rate) examines how good our
𝑅𝑒𝑐 = (2)
𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 + 𝐹𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑁𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 framework is at avoiding false predictions. It denotes the
fraction of predicted non-professional bloggers that are
Understanding of the classification results for both actually non-professional. It can be calculated by the
aforesaid metrics is a little bit tricky. As an illustration, when following Eq. (4):
both metrics have high values, it indicates that framework is
absolutely capable of handling correct output class 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑁𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠
𝑆𝑝𝑒𝑐 = (4)
predictions and vice versa. On the other hand, if the value of 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑁𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 + 𝐹𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠
Rec is low and the value of Pre is high, then it points out that G.M. gives worth to both output classes to produce
output class is not predicted well by framework but it is resultant value by trying to enhance the accuracy on each of
trustable if it does. Likewise, the high Rec and low Pre the output classes. It produces a low value even if a single
values indicate that the framework can predict an output class output class is not well predicted by the model. It can be
very well, but it also includes the points of another class in it calculated by the following Eq. (5).
(in the case of binary classification problem). A single score G. M. = √senstivity ∗ spec (5)
named F-measure encompasses both Pre and Rec. As
discussed above, it is likely that a classifier can have ROC AUC investigates the capability of the proposed
outstanding Pre, but poor Rec or vice versa. In such a case, framework to extinguish between professional/non-
F-measure can represent both scores in a single value once professional blogger. It can produce the following values as
they are calculated. F-measure tries to ensure that each output output; ‘1’ shows a perfect classifier, ‘0.9’ denotes excellent
class exactly contains the points of only one class classifier, ‘0.8’ depicts a good classifier, ‘0.7’ shows a
(professional blogger/non-professional blogger). The mediocre classifier, ‘0.6’ indicates a poor classifier, and
following Eq. (3) is used for the calculation of F-measure: ‘below 0.6’ shows random classifier.
(𝑃𝑟𝑒 ∗ 𝑅𝑒𝑐)
𝐹 − 𝑀𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑒 = 2 ∗ (3)
(𝑃𝑟𝑒 + 𝑅𝑒𝑐)
TABLE 2. Functions used to find the similarity between cases

Name of Similarity Definition

Measure
n
Cosine distance
similarity
x x ck dk

Sim = k =1

 (xck )  (x dk )
cd n 2 n 2

k =1 r =1

Where Simcd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.

  w (xck − xdk ) 

Euclidean distance n 2
Dist cd
= k
k =1

Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.

 (x )
n
Braycurtis distance
ck
− x dk
Dist = k =1

 (x )
cd n

ck
+ x dk
k =1

Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.
n (
Canberra distance xck − xdk )
Dist cd = 
k =1 (xck + xdk )

Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.
Correlation distance (c − c̅). (d − d̅)
Dist cd = 1 −
‖c − c̅‖2 ‖d − d̅‖
2
Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector and c̅
is the mean of elements of c.
Chebyshev distance Dist cd = max|xc − xd |
Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.
1⁄
Minkowski distance p
Dist cd = (∑|xc − xd |p )
Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.
CityBlock distance Dist cd = |xc − xd |
(Manhattan distance) Where Dist cd depicts the distance between cth and dth cases with reference to all features of blogger feature vector.

2 VOLUME XX, 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

Fig 1: Adaptive Influential Blogger Predictor (Block Diagram)

Algorithm 1: Pseudocode for Instagram Crawler

Input: List named as ‘Insta_list’ containing instagram IDs of each blogger ‘BloggerID’
Output: Post_url, Post_text, Number_of_likes, Number_of_comments, Post_comments for each post ‘p’ and Total_posts of each
BloggerID
1: for each BloggerID in Insta_list
2: Posts_list Get each Post_url of BloggerID
3: Total_posts Length of Posts_list
4: for each post p in Posts_list
5: Extract Post_text, Number_of_likes, Number_of_comments, Post_comments
6: Save above-mentioned attributes against each post p in Posts_list including Total_posts of each BloggerID
7: end for
8: end for

case in the case base. Afterwards, similarity measure is

D. SIMILARITY MEASURES
In this paper, eight commonly used distance as well as
similarity measures such as Jaccard, Cosine, Euclidean,
Braycurtis, and Canberra are applied to calculate the
similarity between the new instance and the training data in
Algorithm 3. The comparison of these measures is carried
out on the basis of performance measures discussed in the
section III C. The definitions of these similarity functions are
provided in Table 2.
IV. PROPOSED IBP-BBF FRAMEWORK
In this section, we present the proposed framework in detail
for Influential Blogger Prediction based on Blogger and Blog
Features namely IBP-BBF with respect to its modules,
input/output, and adaptive functionality based on CBR.
The IBP-BBF comprises of three modules, namely Feature
Extraction Module, Influential Blogger Predictor Module,
and Adaptation Module as shown in Fig. 1. Module 1 is
related to the feature extraction of a blogger. The incoming
blogger labeled data (such as his personal information) and
his blogs (unstructured data) are input to the system.
Different features from this blogger data are extracted.
Module 2 is a prediction component, which predicts whether
a blogger is influential or not. The features extracted by
Module 1 are used for the representation of a blogger as a
calculated between the incoming blogger features and the
available cases in case base for future predictions. Module 3
comprises of adaptation. When a new unseen blogger data
are entered in the system, it enables the IBP-BBF to adapt the
changing behavior of a blogger. Modules 2 and 3 include
CBR which learns experience based on reasoning and it can
provide adaptivity in the sense that if a new case is seen
during prediction then this approach updates its rules for
future cases [38]. It has been extensively used by the research
community because it can suggest the solution to unseen
problems based on the past experience of problem solving.
First of all, Algorithm 1 is used to crawl blogs data from
Instagram blogger IDs for this purpose. Afterwards,
Algorithm 2 is used to crawl blogs data of bloggers other
than Instagram. Feedparser python library is used which is
capable of parsing feeds in several formats such as RSS,
RDF, etc. A feed (RSS document) consists of text (whether
full or summarized), and metadata (blog posting date, and
author name).
A. Feature Extraction
We used Continous Bag of Words (CBOW) Word2vec
model of an open-source Gensim library of python. This
model provides vectors (numerical form) of the given text by

2 VOLUME XX, 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

using a neural network of two layers. It takes raw text corpus Numpy library handles large multi-dimensional arrays and
as an input and returns a set of vectors (feature vectors) as consists of high-level mathematical functions which can be
output. It can provide accurate estimates with respect to a manipulated on these arrays. Pandas is a ML library for data
word’s meaning depending upon the previous appearances of manipulation and analysis. It is used to import data from
that word in a corpus. Moreover, these estimates can several file formats in the form of dataframes.
highlight that word’s association with other words. It The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) platform is
provides a vocabulary having items and vectors attached to comprised of text processing libraries having several built-in
them, which is used to find the associations between words. methods. It enabled us to use well-known methods such as
WordNetLemmatizer( ) and PorterStemmer( ). The former is
Algorithm 2: Pseudocode for Blogspot and Wordpress used in Lemmatization process which removes inflectional
Crawler endings. It reduces a word to the root or lexical word, namely
Input: List named as ‘Blogs_list’ containing blog urls of each lemma by linking words with similar meaning to one word
blogger ‘BloggerID’ (based on its context) by using vocabulary. On the other
Output: BlogPost_url, BlogPost_title, BlogPost_text, hand, the latter is used for stemming process which attempts
Blog_created_on for each blogpost ‘p’ and Total_blogposts to chop off the word endings by removing derivational
each BloggerID affixes to a stem without the use of glossary (whether it’s a
1: for each BloggerID in Blogs_list valid contextual word or not). For example, professionals is
2: while feed is not empty reduced to profession by the former process which cannot be
3: Parse each RSS feed and extract BlogPost_title, further analyzed. Likewise, it is reduced to professional by
BlogPost_text, Blog_created_on the latter. Moreover, former reduces funfairs to two root
4: Total_blogposts  Length of feed words fun and fair while the latter removes only s from the
5: Save above-mentioned attributes against each post p end i.e. funfair. Algorithm 3 is used to extract files of each
in Posts_list including Total_posts of each BloggerID blog’s category having vector values of words belonging to
6: end while that category after the data cleaning process.
7: end for

Algorithm 3: Pseudocode for Data cleaning and Word2Vec

from gensim.models import Word2Vec
from gensim.parsing.preprocessing import split_alphanum
from .utils.util_functions import strip_all_entities, remove_stop_words
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer, PorterStemmer
Input: file of all blogs of bloggers ‘file b_file’
Output: csv files of each blog’s category ‘category_name.csv’
1: data_frame read data from b_file
2: blog_cat_list extract each unique category from data_frame
3: for each category ‘c’ in blog_cat_list
4: cat_df extract blogs data frame of category ‘c’ from ‘data_frame’
5: for each row ‘r’ of cat_df
6: blogget blog text from’r’
7: blog remove blogger name from blog
8: blog blog.lower()
9: blog split_alphanum (blog)
10: blog remove_stop_words (blog)
11: blog strip_all_entities (blog)
12: list bl blog.split()
13: for each word ‘w’ in bl
14: if w ends with letter ‘e’
15: lemmatize w and append in list clean_blog_words
16: else
17: stem w and append in list clean_blog_words
18: univ_blog_list  append clean_blog_words
19: Get vocabulary ‘cat_voc’ of unique words from univ_blog_list

2 VOLUME XX, 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

20: Write each word of cat_voc as column name ‘col’ in excel sheet ‘category_name.csv’
21: for each index i of univ_blog_list
22: single_blog_model= Word2Vec(univ_blog_list[i])
23: for each blog word ‘bw’ in univ_blog_list[i]
24: score=np.mean (single_blog_model.wv(bw)
25: write score of bw against its col at row i in category_name.csv
26: end for

Fig. 2 The proposed IBP-BBF framework for influential blogger prediction

In the case of high dimensional data, a classifier starts
focusing the irrelevant features of input data which may
result in its poor performance [39]. Also, the availability of
huge amount of data makes it impractical to examine
everything in a dataset because of resource constraints [6].
Keep all this in mind, in this work, as each category has a
huge number of unique words, so we used Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the feature
dimensions. We have used PCA with different variance
values such as 85%, 90%, 95%, and 99%, in order to select
the best value where results are found optimized. Algorithm
4 is used to extract principal components of each category
with respect to each variance value. Here, the PCA generated
files are four in number with respect to each category.
After this step, each instance of each category is tagged
based on the ground truth obtained from survey (whether the
blogger is professional or otherwise). Afterwards each file is
gone through blogger classification in non-adaptive and
adaptive manner. For each new instance of bloggers data, the
similarity between all the cases (training data) already stored
in Case Repository (CR), and the new case is determined by
using Algorithm 5. If the similarity value is greater than or
equal to 80%, then a list of candidate solutions named LIST1
is maintained. After traversing all training data in CR, most
frequently occurring solution is used (reuse the case) to
predict the blogger as professional/non-professional.

2 VOLUME XX, 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

Algorithm 4: Pseudocode for Principal Component On the other hand, if LIST1 contains such solutions
Analysis where half solutions classify an unseen problem as Influential
import pandas as pd Blogger and the other half classify as Non-Influential
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler Blogger, then the very first solution of LIST2, if exists, is
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA added to LIST1 to make an odd number of solution in it.
Input: variance value var_val, category file Further, the most occurring solution of LIST1 is reused to
category_name.csv classify the unseen problem. However, if list LIST1 is found
Output: file PCA_category_var_val.csv having principal empty which denotes that there is no previous solution
components with var_val amount available for the new problem, then the prediction is
1: data_frame read data from category_name.csv performed on the basis of the already trained BRF model.
2: X StandardScaler().fit_transform (data_frame)
This phase of IBP-BBF is basically known as Revise phase
3: pca PCA(var_val)
4: Principal_componentspca.fit_transform(X) where the proposed system automatically predicts the
5:Principal_dataframepd.Dataframe(data=Principal_compon solution without human interference in unseen situations.
ents) Finally, the Retain phase is used to add up the newly
6: Final_dfpd.concat(join principal components and final predicted solution of aforesaid unseen problem in CR for
class) future use.
7: Write Final_df in PCA_category_var_val Algorithm 6: Pseudocode of IBP-BBF in an adaptive
manner
In the IBP-BBF framework, blogger features and its blog Input: Blogger Feature Vector (BFV)
post features are the input, and professional/non-professional Output: Prediction of Influential/non-influential Blogger
bloggers are the output, which we want to predict. Fig. 2 (IB/NIB)
represents the proposed IBP-BBF. 1: Extract the incoming blogger features BFV
Likewise, Algorithm 6 is designed as an adaptive 2: Train BRF model based on CR
algorithm for influential blogger identification. The cleaned 3: Calculate similarity between new blogger and training data in CR
input files of blogger feature vectors with tagging are the 4: if similarity is >=80%
5: Retrieve and Maintain list LIST1
input of Algorithm 6. The training data are kept in CR. First
6: else
of all, Balanced Random Model is trained based on these 7: if similarity is >=60%
cases available in CR. Afterwards, the similarity between the 8: Retrieve and Maintain list LIST2
new unseen problem and the training data is calculated. If the 9: end if
calculated similarity is greater or equal to 80%, then the list 10: if LIST1 is not empty
LIST1 is maintained by retrieving all the solutions of 11: if no. of elements of LIST1> LIST2 with 80% matching
previous cases having at least 80% similarity with the unseen 12: if LIST1 has an odd number of occurrences
13: Reuse solution and predict based on majority voting
problem. On the other hand, if the similarity is greater or 14: else
equal to 60%, then the list LIST2 is maintained, which 15: if LIST1 has even no. of occurrences & LIST2 !=empty
contains all the solution of those cases who are at least 60% 16: Add LIST2[0] in LIST1
similar to new problem. Now, if the former list is not empty 17: Predict based on majority voting
and have a number of solutions as compared to the latter list, 18: else
then the solution to the unseen problem is devised based on 19: Reuse solution & predict by first occurrence of LIST1
20: else
the most frequently occurring solution in LIST1. 21: Revise solution and predict by BRF model
22: Retain new blogger features and solution by adding in CR
Algorithm 5: Pseudocode of IBP-BBF in non-adaptive 23: else
manner 24: Revise solution and predict by BRF model
Input: Blogger Feature Vector (BFV) 25: Retain new blogger features and solution by adding in CR
26:end if
Output: Prediction of Influential/non-influential Blogger
(IB/NIB)
V. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN AND DISCUSSION
1: Extract the incoming blogger features
This section presents the complete series of steps carried
2: Calculate the similarity between the new blogger and training
out to evaluate the proposed IBP-BBF framework. For
data in Case Repository (CR)
experiments, an HP laptop having Intel ® Core (TM) i7-
3: if similarity is >=80%
7500U CPU @ 2.7 Hertz processor, a RAM of 8 GB, and
4: Maintain list LIST1
Windows 10 (64 bit) operating system is used. The IBP-BBF
5: if LIST1 is not empty
framework and all algorithms are implemented in Python 2.7
6: Reuse solution and predict based on majority voting
using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE),
7: else
namely PyCharm 4.0.7. We used 10-fold cross validation for
8: “Can’t predict solution”
results evaluation in order to indicate the efficiency of the

2 VOLUME XX, 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

TABLE 3. Different categories extracted from unstructured data

S. No. Category Name No. of instances Principle components

1. Activities, private thoughts, and reflections Total instances :1525 1274 at0.99 variance
+ve instances:112 936 at 0.95 variance
-ve instances:1413 714 at 0.90 variance
583 at 0.85 variance
2. Human rights issue and development Total instances:302 270 at0.99 variance
+ve instances:120 228 at 0.95 variance
-ve instances:182 196 at 0.90 variance
170 at 0.85 variance
3. Self experiences Total instances:2267 1864 at 0.99 variance
+ve instances:638 1429 at 0.95 variance
-ve instances:1629 1129 at 0.90 variance
929 at 0.85 variance
4. Tourism Total instances:758 656 at 0.99 variance
+ve instances:494 529 at 0.95 variance
-ve instances:264 430 at 0.90 variance
355 at 0.85 variance
5. Business and digital marketing Total instances:423 254 at 0.99 variance
+ve instances:56 171 at 0.95 variance
-ve instances:367 151 at 0.90 variance
135 at 0.85 variance
6. Poetry, literature and art Total instances:762 660 at 0.99 variance
+ve instances:63 510 at 0.95 variance
-ve instances:699 403 at 0.90 variance
328 at 0.85 variance

proposed framework for influential blogger identification.
Furthermore, results of the proposed IBP-BBF framework
are compared with existing top-nouch machine learning
techniques for imbalanced data classification such as BRF,
RUSBoost, and BBC by using their default parameters.
However, IB-CBR algorithm is also used for results
comparison to investigate it on imbalanced data, although it
is not tested and designed for this purpose. The reason behind
using this algorithm is its outstanding performance among
our former research works [19-21]. In this work, standard
imbalanced data performance evaluation metrics such as
Spec, F-measure, G.M., and ROC area under the curve are
used for experimental outcomes evaluation. The performance
of the IBP-BBF framework is investigated on all datasets
(falling into different categories) obtained from online
blogger’s survey.
To reduce the data dimensions, PCA technique is used.
Different values of variance such as 85%, 90%, 95%, and
99% are examined to select the best value for each category
dataset. As there are six categories (datasets), so it means that
total 24 data files are used for experiments (where each
category has four dataset files having different aforesaid
variance values with different number of principal
components. Table 3 shows these categories, their number of
instances along with PCA generated a varying number of
components at different variance values. Afterwards, each
data file is given as an input to Algorithm 5 and Algorithm 6
to compare the results of both algorithms for influential
blogger classification in a non-adaptive as well as an
adaptive manner respectively. The results highlights that the
suggested adaptive algorithm beats its competitor in terms of
performance measures for influential blogger classification.
Table 4 shows the results of both aforesaid algorithms in the
case of Activities, private thoughts and reflections dataset
with 85% variance. It is clear from the results that adaptive
algorithm adds up to the predictive capabilities of the
suggested framework.
Table 5 shows the results for influential blogger
classification with respect to Human rights issue and
development dataset in a non-adaptive and adaptive manner.
The outcomes indicate that the results obtained from
Algorithm 5 (before adaptation) are worst with respect to F-
measure (i.e. 0) and G.M. (i.e. 0). It indicates the poor test’s
accuracy to distinctly identify output classes and
classification failure of non-adaptive algorithm. On the other
hand, the higher values of all performance metrics after
adaptation with respect to all similarity measures highlights
the success of influential blogger classification (by using
Algorithm 6). In the case of other four datasets, the similar
observance is found and adaptive algorithm is found far
better in the very first iteration as compared to Algorithm 5.
However, results are not shown here due to paper length
limitations.
To evaluate the performance of aforementioned similarity
measures, we examined aforesaid eight similarity measures
for each category’s data files having varying variances.
Afterwards, similarity measures with higher performance in
all varying-variance files of each category are selected by
using IBP-BBF, and the merging candidates (CBR-BBC and
CBR-RB), which are the combination of BBC and
RUSBoost respectively with case-based reasoning
methodology. This way, the same process is repeated for all

2 VOLUME XX, 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

TABLE 4. Adaptation comparison through IBP-BBF Framework for influential blogger prediction in the case of Activities, private thoughts and
reflections dataset

Similarity measure Before Adaptation (%) After Adaptation (%)

Spec. F-measure G.M. Spec. F-measure G.M
Cosine Distance 97% 65% 68% 92.7% 76.8% 80.0%
Euclidean Distance 100% 0% 4% 91.0% 79.4% 83.1%
Braycurtis Distance 98% 43% 52% 91.5% 79.1% 82.8%
Canberra Distance 100% 0% 0% 89.1% 80.6% 83.1%
Correlation Distance 97% 68% 71% 92.1% 79.0% 81.5%
Chebyshev Distance 100% 0% 0% 90.1% 80.9% 83.3%
Minkowski Distance 100% 0% 0% 91.4% 80.0% 84.0%
CityBlock Distance 100% 0% 0% 93.1% 80.9% 83.4%

TABLE 5. Adaptation comparison through IBP-BBF Framework for influential blogger prediction in the case of Human rights issue and development
dataset

Similarity measure Before Adaptation (%) After Adaptation (%)

Spec. F-measure G.M. Spec. F-measure G.M
Cosine Distance 100.0% 51.1% 57.7% 97.2% 96.7% 97.0%
Euclidean Distance 100.0% 51.1% 57.8% 97.5% 96.7% 97.1%
Braycurtis Distance 100.0% 38.1% 45.1% 97.0% 96.4% 96.7%
Canberra Distance 100.0% 52.9% 59.1% 97.2% 96.7% 97.0%
Correlation Distance 100.0% 52.9% 59.1% 98.0% 97.4% 97.6%
Chebyshev Distance 100.0% 38.1% 45.1% 97.3% 96.4% 96.8%
Minkowski Distance 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 97.2% 96.7% 97.0%
CityBlock Distance 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 97.3% 96.4% 96.8%

Fig. 3 Performance comparison by using different algorithms for influential blogger prediction

categories. After the completion of the whole process, the
following outcomes are obtained. The higher values of
performance measures in Activities, private thoughts and
reflections dataset are achieved with 85% variance under
Minkowski similarity measure in three iterations. It remains
true for all CBR-based classifiers named as suggested IBP-
BBF, CBR-BBC and CBR-RB. In the first iteration, many
similarity measures are on the same stage in terms of
performance for this dataset. However, it is clear in three
iterations that Minkowski similarity iteratively keeps on
learning from new problems and positively contributes to the
performance of the IBP-BBF framework. Moreover, the

VOLUME XX, 2017 9

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
outcomes show the strength of proposed IBP-BBF
framework as compared to CBR-BBC and CBR-RB in terms
of all performance measures such as 91.4% Spec., 80% F-
measure, 84% G.M., and 93.6% ROC area under the curve.
On the other hand, in the context of baseline methods, IBP-
BBF performs almost similar to BRF for influential blogger
classification, however, the former is found slightly better
than the latter in terms of Spec., and G.M. Furthermore, BRF
is found as a better classifier among aforesaid baseline
methods. However, IB-CBR achieved the worst spec.
(43.7%), and G.M. (62.3%), which shows its weakness in the
case of imbalanced dataset. Fig. 3 shows all these results.
In the case of Human rights and Development dataset,
again Minkowski similarity measure iteratively performed
well with respect to other similarities in terms of
performance measures in three iterations. The proposed IBP-
BBF framework shows outstanding performance as
compared to other baseline methods as well as merging
competitors classifiers for influential blogger classification. It
obtained 97.2% Spec., 96.7% F-Measure, 97% G.M., and
99.4% ROC area under the curve. Further, IB-CBR is in the
second last in terms of performance, but outperforms as
compared to RUSBoost.
Likewise, high performance is seen in the Self-experience
dataset with 85% variance and Minkowski distance similarity
in three iterations. It is observed that IBP-BBF beats its
competitor algorithms having 95.8% spec., 96.2% F-
Measure, 96.3% G.M., and 98.9% ROC area under the curve.
Also, BRF remains on the top in baseline methods for
influential blogger identification. However, IB-CBR obtained
lowest values for performance measures. IB-CBR
performance is lesser than other methods which is likely due
to the fact that this classifier is not designed for imbalanced
datasets.
Fig. 4 Performance measures comparison of merging contestants in the revise phase of the proposed IBP-BBF framework for influential blogger
identification.
VOLUME XX, 2017
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
In the case of Tourism dataset, we again achieve higher
performance for influential blogger classification with 85%
variance and Minkowski distance similarity. IBP-BBF
outperforms other methods with higher performance, such as
99.8% spec., 99.6% F-measure, 99.7% G.M., and 100%
ROC area under the curve for influential blogger
classification. In this case, IB-CBR and BBC performed
similarly. BRF remains on the top in baseline methods with
respect to its performance in classifying bloggers into
professional or otherwise. The results can be seen in Fig. 4.
Likewise, Fig. 5 compares the results of IBP-BBF for
prediction with other baseline methods such as IB-CBR,
RUSBoost, BRF, and BBC in the case of aforesaid three
datasets. On the other hand, in the case of Business and
Digital Marketing, it is found that Minkowski similarity with
99% variance produces overall better prediction results in the
case of IBP-BBF having 94.8% spec., 92.9% F-Measure,
91.1% G.M., and 95.2% ROC area under the curve.
Moreover, IBP-BBF outperforms other baseline methods in
terms of performance measures for influential blogger
classification. Again, BRF performed well among baseline
methods in terms of performance measures. Likewise, in the
case of Poetry, Literature and Arts, again Minkowski
similarity measure is found better with 85% variance which
keeps on enhancing the performance of the proposed
framework. It is found that IBP-BBF shows excellent
performance for influential blogger identification by having
79.7 % Spec., 86.6% F-measure, 81.6% G.M., and 91.6%
ROC area under the curve. Among baseline methods, the
BBC is found effective for influential blogger classification.
The worst performance of CBR-RB merger is seen in this
dataset shown in Table 6.
9
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

Fig. 5 Performance Comparison of the proposed IBP-BBF framework with IB-CBR, RUSBoost, BRF, and BBC for influential blogger identification

TABLE 6. Performance measure comparison by using different algorithms

Classifier Business and digital marketing Poetry, Literature and Art

Spec. F-Measure G.M. ROC Spec. F-Measure G.M. ROC
IB-CBR 62.7% 93.0% 75.3% 94.7% 38.6% 91.2% 56.9% 89.0%
RUSBoost 58.4% 85.7% 69.4% 84.9% 39.6% 87.3% 56.4% 78.2%
BRF 92.5% 91.4% 91.5% 96.6% 79.7% 86.4% 81.5% 91.0%
BBC 81.1% 86.7% 83.0% 91.2% 79.8% 86.7% 81.7% 89.0%
IBP-BBF 94.8% 92.9% 91.1% 95.2% 79.7% 86.6% 81.6% 91.6%
CBR-RB 67.1% 92.1% 77.9% 90.7% 59.9% 89.2% 72.0% 85.0%
CBR-BBC 87.5% 88.7% 87.5% 93.7% 81.2% 86.3% 82.2% 87.5%

To further examine the performance of each similarity
measure with respect to more number of iterations, we have
investigated the efficiency of proposed IBP-BBF framework
up to three iterations. It helps in determining such a similarity
measure which can keep on improving the performance of
the IBP-BBF framework for future instances in terms of
influential blogger prediction. The results show that the
Minkowski similarity measure is at the top as compared to
other similarity measures in more iterations of the proposed
framework. This remains true for all datasets, as an
illustration, Table 7 shows the outcomes in the case of
Poetry, Literature, and Art dataset.
In the case of labeled data, bloggers features dataset (having
answers of the questionnaire and the output class as
professional blogger/non-professional blogger) is directly
given as input to the proposed IBP-BBF framework. The
results indicate that Minkowski maintained its top position in
terms of performance measures as compared to other
similarity measures. It achieved maximum values for Spec.
(100%), F-measure (100%), G.M. (100%), and ROC area
under the curve (100%) in all iterations. Although, the values
of performance metrics are found increasing in the second
and third iteration of IBP-BBF as compared to first iteration
but those results are found lesser than Minkowski similarity
measure even in the very first iteration of the proposed
framework. Results can be seen in Fig. 6.
Generally speaking about the experimental outcomes of
this research work, it is observed that the proposed IBP-BBF
overall remained on the top as compared to other baseline
methods and CBR-based merging candidates namely CBR-
RB, and CBR-BBC. Besides, the overall results in each
dataset are found better in terms of all performance measures
with 85% variance except Business and Digital Marketing.
Although, it is stated earlier that performance of a similarity
measure can be related to the data dimensions [19] which
indicates that there is a possibility that different similarity
measures can behave differently on different number of input
features. Perhaps, it is the reason behind the outstanding
performance of Minkowski similarity measure as compared

VOLUME XX, 2017 9

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

TABLE 7. Performance measures comparison for Influential blogger identification by using different similarity measures with one, two a nd three
iterations using Poetry, Literature, and Art dataset

Similarity Measure No. of iterations Spec. F-measure G.M. ROC AUC

Cosine Distance One iteration 81.1% 86.1% 82.0% 91.0%
Two iterations 55.1% 83.1% 66.0% 92.8%
Three iterations 57.9% 88.1% 70.2% 95.6%
Euclidean Distance One iteration 79.7% 86.5% 81.6% 91.4%
Two iterations 57.1% 84.4% 67.9% 93.1%
Three iterations 54.7% 83.5% 65.8% 93.6%
Braycurtis Distance One iteration 78.3% 86.4% 80.7% 91.0%
Two iterations 57.6% 84.6% 68.4% 92.8%
Three iterations 60.3% 89.3% 72.3% 95.9%
One iteration 79.7% 86.3% 81.4% 90.3%
Canberra Distance Two iterations 55.3% 84.0% 66.5% 92.7%
Three iterations 53.4% 83.1% 64.8% 93.2%
One iteration 79.8% 86.7% 81.7% 91.8%
Correlation Distance Two iterations 66.4% 85.8% 74.6% 93.4%
Three iterations 73.6% 90.7% 81.2% 95.7%
One iteration 81.1% 86.1% 82.0% 91.6%
Chebyshev Distance Two iterations 54.6% 83.6% 65.8% 92.8%
Three iterations 54.2% 84.0% 65.7% 93.7%
One iteration 79.7% 86.6% 81.6% 91.6%
Minkowski Distance Two iterations 89.5% 89.2% 88.8% 93.2%
Three iterations 96.1% 93.4% 94.6% 96.3%
One iteration 79.8% 86.9% 81.8% 91.8%
CityBlock Distance Two iterations 55.9% 84.7% 67.2% 93.1%
Three iterations 55.2% 84.4% 66.6% 93.5%

Fig. 6 Performance comparison of different algorithms for influential blogger identification by using Labeled dataset
to all other candidate similarity measures in three iterations measure can be a useful candidate where we have no
of IBP-BBF. It is also suggested previously that minkowski knowledge of true distance metric [40]. Moreover, it is the

VOLUME XX, 2017 9

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
combination of Euclidean and Manhattan distance similarity
and in the case of unstructured data such as blogs, it seems
difficult to identify a feasible similarity measure, which
increases the successful applicability of this measure. In this
experimental study, it seems effective to learn data patterns
and future predictions, which is the reason of the gradual
increase in the performance of the proposed IBP-BBF
framework.
Additionally, CBR-BBC and CBR-RB are on the second
and third number respectively. It is important to highlight
that previous authors have concluded that in general hybrid
Bagging (combined bagging with data sampling) algorithm is
better than hybrid Boosting (combined boosting with data
sampling) for classification results provided the data is
imbalanced and noisy [41]. Here, in this research work, we
have also found that the performance of BBC (the hybrid of
bagging with random under sampling technique) is
comparatively better than RUSBoost (the hybrid of adaboost
with random under sampling technique) in all imbalanced
datasets except Tourism, which shows that research results
are consistent with previous findings. Furthermore, in this
research, it is also seen that the integration of Bagging and
Boosting with CBR methodology (such as CBR-BBC, and
CBR-RB) follows the same pattern in all datasets except
Tourism. The performance of former remains better as
compared to the latter for influential blogger identification. It
indicates that whether we merge hybrid bagging and hybrid
boosting with case-based reasoning, the former is likely to
achieve more efficiency than the latter in the context of
focused domain. It is probably due to the fact that bagging
can avoid over-fitting which is its strength over boosting. It is
clearly stated in [42] that boosting may suffer overfitting due
to the increase in number of iterations. These iterations are
used to adjust an observation’s weight with respect to
previous trees built during prior iteration. The generalization
ability for concept learning of an overfitted boosting model
decreases due to fitting too closely to training data [43]. On
the other hand, bagging uses several learners (trees without
pruning) in the training phase to contribute in final prediction
which seems less likely to overfit. The selection of subsets in
the training phase of these ensemble classifiers and the
method used for future predictions based on the output of N
classifiers contributes to their predictive capabilities. Bagging
assigns equal weight to every classifier and predicts unseen
instances by using the responses of these N classifiers based
on majority voting. It recursively keeps on selecting the
random subsets with replacement from the full training set
and provides equal chances to each instance of getting
selected as a new subset. It keeps each model obtained from
the training process for future data classifications. On the
other hand, boosting assigns performance-based weights to N
classifiers in the training phase by using the weighted
average method. Instead of selecting subsets of the training
data at random in the training phase, it chooses new subsets
of such instances which were mis-classified by previous
VOLUME XX, 2017
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
models. Due to this biased selection of subsets, the output of
new models is affected which leads to over-fitting.
Another finding of this research work is the excellent
performance of BRF, which is found at the top in baseline
methods. It is also found as well-performed merging
candidate as compared to CBR-BBC, and CBR-RB with
CBR. It uses down sampling majority class technique in the
training phase to select the subsets of the full training set,
which prevents majority class dominating the classifier by
removing majority class examples [34]. It focuses on the
equal representation of each class in each decision tree by
artificially modifying the class distribution, which is likely to
positively contribute to its predictive capabilities.
The most important finding that must be highlighted is that
the CBR-BRF, CBR-RB, and CBR-BBC performs better
than baseline methods i.e. BRF, RUSBoost, and BBC
classifiers in the revise phase of IBP-BBF, which indicates
that merging of case-based reasoning with these baseline
methods positively contribute towards the efficiency of a
classifier for influential blogger identification, provided the
data is imbalanced. The working strategy of CBR i.e. to learn
from previous experiences and to store former problem
solution pairs for future prediction adds up to its significance
for predictions.
As stated earlier, the performance of an adaptive
algorithm, namely IB-CBR’s is also explored since it has
been on the top in the chain of our previous experiments for
influential blogger identification [19]. Unfortunately, its
overall performance is not found satisfactory with respect to
other classifiers in the context of imbalanced data. As authors
embed RF in the revise phase of IB-CBR, so there is a
significant probability that it can badly affect the learning
process in the case of imbalanced data. The reason behind is
that the subsets used for training purpose of a classifier in the
case of imbalanced dataset may have a few or none of
minority class examples [34]. As decision trees in RF are
built based on such training subsets [44], which can lead to
its poor performance in the classification of unseen examples
of minority class; negatively contributing to the efficiency of
IB-CBR.
A. Proof of concept
In this section, we discuss the possible reasons behind the
performance of under investigation algorithms. It is seen
earlier that RUSBoost is a simpler, and faster algorithm with
favorable classification performance [37]. However, BRF
beats RUSBoost for influential blogger identification in this
study. The latter being the forest of stumps (i.e. decision trees
only with one split) gives more worth (weights) to the stumps
having less prediction errors and do not entertain all stumps
equally for final prediction. This baised working nature of
latter classifier can lead it to overfitting which is probably the
cause of its lesser classification performance as compared to
BRF where the latter gives equal importance to each decision
tree for final prediction.
9
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
In literature, RF is not considered as a suitable option for
data classification if the data is imbalanced [34]. Because, it
reduces overall error rate and emphasizes more on accurately
classifying the majority class examples leading to poor
accuracy rate for minority class examples. The poor
performance of IB-CBR is the evidence in this perspective.
On the other hand, BRF produced outstanding results for
influential blogger identification due to the selection of
balanced down-sampled data and modified split node criteria.
At each iteration in RF, BRF extracts bootstrap sample from
the minority class and the same number of cases is randomly
extracted from majority class with replacement. Moreover, it
uses CART algorithm in which each node is split based on
randomly selected variables instead of choosing the best
variable for node split (while building decsision trees). By
repeating the above process as desired, final prediction is
made by aggregating the predictions of the ensemble. In this
study, we found BRF classifier better for influential blogger
classification when merged with CBR approach (i.e. IBP-
BBF framework) as compared to all previously highlighted
supreme baseline imbalanced data classification methods.
Also, the success of standard BRF with respect to its
competitor classifiers in this problem domain is probably the
proof of excellent modification in standard RF by authors of
[34].
In bagging, instead of choosing the best node split feature
from subset of randomly selected features, all features are
considered for this purpose. All the features have different
levels of information gain for correct data classification and
can’t be equally important [45]. Most probably, the working
nature of bagging is the reason behind the lesser performance
of BBC for influential blogger prediction as compared to
BRF.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This study presents an Influential Blogger Prediction based
on CBR framework using BRF, which is composed of
adaptive capabilities for the identification of influential
bloggers provided the data is imbalanced. Such leading
individuals can be hired by different companies for their
product marketing to the relevant audiences which can lead
to their success. This study attempts to map the standard
autonomic system characteristics such as self-prediction, and
self-adaptation in the influential blogger identification
problem. This way the labeled as well as unstructured data of
bloggers both can be used to predict influential bloggers
using autonomic characteristics of IBP-BBF. The outcome of
the suggested framework is compared with state-of-the art
imbalanced data classification techniques such as BRF, BBC,
and RUSBoost. The results indicate that the proposed CBR
approach for the proposed framework outperformed other
competing classifiers for influential blogger prediction and
adaptation. Further, this study provides the successful
merging of CBR approach with the aforesaid classifiers
instead of using them in a standard way for better
VOLUME XX, 2017
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
classification results. As unseen future problems can be
solved by IBP-BBF without an explicitly trained non-
adaptive model, which makes the CBR approach more fit for
our problem.
This study is basically an initiative towards handling
labeled and unstructured data collectively for the prediction
of influential bloggers. However, the scope of the proposed
method in terms of performance evaluation is limited to
imbalanced data and the results may differ in the context of
balanced data. Also, the selection of another dimensionality
reduction method can influence experimental outcomes.
In the future, the scope of this research can be extended to
evaluate the efficiency of proposed solution in terms of speed
for data classification. It may include the handling of
adaptive maintenance of case-repository in terms of its size
growth upon saving the new unseen problems with the
prescribed solutions. The comparison of different feature
selection techniques other than PCA on the performance
gain of IBP-BBF is also under investigation. The
investigation of Stanford Glove and Google BERT instead of
Word2vec for vector representation of words is also in the
pipeline. We also aim to explore the significance of deep
neural networks in this problem domain.
Conflict of interest
None.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Mr. Abdul Majeed from
Systems Limited, Pakistan, for his useful discussion in
technical perspective and providing language help.
REFERENCES
[1] Y. Asim, A. K. Malik, B. Raza, W. Naeem, and S. Rathore,
"Community-centric brokerage-aware access control for online
social networks," Future Generation Computer Systems, vol.
109, pp. 469-478, 2020.
[2] T. Araujo, P. Neijens, and R. Vliegenthart, "Getting the word
out on Twitter: the role of influentials, information brokers and
strong ties in building word-of-mouth for brands,"
International Journal of Advertising, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 496-
513, 2017.
[3] M. Han, M. Yan, Z. Cai, Y. Li, X. Cai, and J. Yu, "Influence
maximization by probing partial communities in dynamic
online social networks," Transactions on Emerging
Telecommunications Technologies, vol. 28, no. 4, 2017.
[4] Y. Yang and J. Pei, "Influence Analysis in Evolving Networks:
A Survey," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
Engineering, 2019.
[5] Y. Asim, A. K. Malik, B. Raza, and A. R. Shahid, "A trust
model for analysis of trust, influence and their relationship in
social network communities," Telematics and Informatics, vol.
36, pp. 94-116, 2019.
[6] R. Bian, Y. S. Koh, G. Dobbie, and A. Divoli, "Identifying
Top-k Nodes in Social Networks: A Survey," ACM Computing
Surveys (CSUR), vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 22, 2019.
[7] N. HAFIENE, W. KAROUI, and L. B. ROMDHANE,
"Influential nodes detection in dynamic social networks: A
Survey," Expert Systems with Applications, pp. 113642, 2020.
9
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
[8] K. Zhao and A. Kumar, "Who blogs what: understanding the
publishing behavior of bloggers," World Wide Web, vol. 16, no.
5-6, pp. 621-644, 2013.
[9] H. U. Khan, A. Daud, U. Ishfaq, T. Amjad, N. Aljohani, R. A.
Abbasi, et al., "Modelling to identify influential bloggers in the
blogosphere: A survey," Computers in Human Behavior, vol.
68, pp. 64-82, 2017.
[10] H. U. Khan and A. Daud, "Finding the top influential bloggers
based on productivity and popularity features," New Review of
Hypermedia and Multimedia, pp. 1-18, 2016.
[11] F. S. Gharehchopogh, S. R. Khaze, and I. Maleki, "A new
approach in bloggers classification with hybrid of k-nearest
neighbor and artificial neural network algorithms," Indian
Journal of Science and Technology, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 237-246,
2015.
[12] F. S. Gharehchopogh and S. R. Khaze, "Data mining
application for cyber space users tendency in blog writing: a
case study," International Journal of Computer Applications
vol. 47, no. 18, pp. 40-46, 2013.
[13] N. A. Samsudin, A. Mustapha, and M. H. A. Wahab,
"Ensemble classification of cyber space users tendency in blog
writing using random forest," in Innovations in Information
Technology (IIT), 2016 12th International Conference on, Al-
Ain, United Arab Emirates, 2016, pp. 169-172.
[14] C. Fullwood, K. Melrose, N. Morris, and S. Floyd, "Sex, blogs,
and baring your soul: factors influencing UK blogging
strategies," Journal of the Association for Information Science
and Technology, vol. 64, no. 2, pp. 345-355, 2013.
[15] B. Quadir and N.-S. Chen, "The effects of reading and writing
habits on blog adoption," Behaviour & Information
Technology, vol. 34, no. 9, pp. 893-901, 2015.
[16] H.-M. Lai and C.-P. Chen, "Factors influencing secondary
school teachers’ adoption of teaching blogs," Computers &
Education, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 948-960, 2011.
[17] H. Hassani, C. Beneki, S. Unger, M. T. Mazinani, and M. R.
Yeganegi, "Text Mining in Big Data Analytics," Big Data and
Cognitive Computing, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1, 2020.
[18] F. Li and T. C. Du, "Maximizing micro-blog influence in
online promotion," Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 70,
pp. 52-66, 2017.
[19] Y. Asim, B. Raza, A. K. Malik, A. R. Shahaid, and H.
Alquhayz, "An Adaptive Model for Identification of Influential
Bloggers Based on Case-Based Reasoning Using Random
Forest," IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 87732-87749, 2019.
[20] Y. Asim, A. R. Shahid, A. K. Malik, and B. Raza,
"Significance of machine learning algorithms in professional
blogger's classification," Computers & Electrical Engineering,
vol. 65, pp. 461-473, 2018.
[21] Y. Asim, B. Raza, A. K. Malik, S. Rathore, and A. Bilal,
"Improving the Performance of Professional Blogger’s
Classification," presented at the International Conference on
Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies,
Sukkar IBA, Pakistan, 2018.
[22] P. Branco, L. Torgo, and R. P. Ribeiro, "A survey of predictive
modeling on imbalanced domains," ACM Computing Surveys
(CSUR), vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 1-50, 2016.
[23] M. A. U. H. Tahir, S. Asghar, A. Manzoor, and M. A. Noor, "A
classification model for class imbalance dataset using genetic
programming," IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 71013-71037, 2019.
[24] S. Cateni, V. Colla, and M. Vannucci, "A method for
resampling imbalanced datasets in binary classification tasks
for real-world problems," Neurocomputing, vol. 135, pp. 32-41,
2014.
[25] H. He and E. A. Garcia, "Learning from imbalanced data,"
IEEE Transactions on knowledge and data engineering, vol.
21, no. 9, pp. 1263-1284, 2009.
[26] A. Orriols-Puig, E. Bernadó-Mansilla, D. E. Goldberg, K.
Sastry, and P. L. Lanzi, "Facetwise analysis of XCS for
problems with class imbalances," IEEE Transactions on
Evolutionary Computation, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 1093-1119, 2009.
[27] S. García and F. Herrera, "Evolutionary undersampling for
classification with imbalanced datasets: Proposals and
VOLUME XX, 2017
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)
taxonomy," Evolutionary computation, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 275-
306, 2009.
[28] M. J. Khan, M. M. Awais, S. Shamail, and I. Awan, "An
empirical study of modeling self-management capabilities in
autonomic systems using case-based reasoning," Simulation
Modelling Practice and Theory, vol. 19, no. 10, pp. 2256-2275,
2011.
[29] B. Raza, A. Aslam, A. Sher, A. K. Malik, and M. Faheem,
"Autonomic performance prediction framework for data
warehouse queries using lazy learning approach," Applied Soft
Computing, pp. 106216, 2020.
[30] N. Shaheen, B. Raza, A. R. Shahid, and H. Alquhayz, "A Novel
Optimized Case-based Reasoning approach with K-means
Clustering and Genetic Algorithm for Predicting Multi-class
Workload Characterization in Autonomic Database and Data
Warehouse System," IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 105713-105727,
2020.
[31] S. W. VanderStoep and D. D. Johnson, Research methods for
everyday life: Blending qualitative and quantitative
approaches, 1 ed. vol. 32. San Francisco,: John Wiley & Sons,
2008.
[32] P. SanMiguel and T. Sádaba, "Nice to be a fashion blogger,
hard to be influential: An analysis based on personal
characteristics, knowledge criteria, and social factors," Journal
of global fashion marketing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 40-58, 2018.
[33] M. Taki, "Bloggers and the Blogosphere in Lebanon & Syria:
meanings and activities," Ph.D., Media, Art and Design
department, University of Westminster, UK, 2010.
[34] C. Chen, A. Liaw, and L. Breiman, "Using Random Forest to
Learn Imbalanced Data," 2004.
[35] L. Breiman, "Bagging predictors," Machine learning, vol. 24,
no. 2, pp. 123-140, 1996.
[36] M. Galar, A. Fernandez, E. Barrenechea, H. Bustince, and F.
Herrera, "A review on ensembles for the class imbalance
problem: bagging-, boosting-, and hybrid-based approaches,"
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C
(Applications and Reviews), vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 463-484, 2011.
[37] C. Seiffert, T. M. Khoshgoftaar, J. Van Hulse, and A.
Napolitano, "RUSBoost: A hybrid approach to alleviating class
imbalance," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans, vol. 40, no. 1, pp.
185-197, 2009.
[38] I. Watson, "Case-based reasoning is a methodology not a
technology," Knowledge-based systems, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 303-
308, 1999.
[39] M. Al‐Maitah, "Text analytics for big data using rough–fuzzy
soft computing techniques," Expert Systems, vol. 36, no. 6, pp.
e12463, 2019.
[40] B. Lu, M. Charlton, C. Brunsdon, and P. Harris, "The
Minkowski approach for choosing the distance metric in
geographically weighted regression," International Journal of
Geographical Information Science, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 351-368,
2016.
[41] T. M. Khoshgoftaar, J. Van Hulse, and A. Napolitano,
"Comparing boosting and bagging techniques with noisy and
imbalanced data," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans, vol. 41, no. 3, pp.
552-568, 2010.
[42] P. Bühlmann and T. Hothorn, "Boosting algorithms:
Regularization, prediction and model fitting," Statistical
Science, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 477-505, 2007.
[43] Y. Ganjisaffar, R. Caruana, and C. V. Lopes, "Bagging
gradient-boosted trees for high precision, low variance ranking
models," in Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR
conference on Research and development in Information
Retrieval, Beijing, China, 2011, pp. 85-94.
[44] I. Ullah, B. Raza, A. K. Malik, M. Imran, S. U. Islam, and S.
W. Kim, "A churn prediction model using random forest:
analysis of machine learning techniques for churn prediction
and factor identification in telecom sector," IEEE Access, vol.
7, pp. 60134-60149, 2019.
9
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3048610, IEEE Access
Author Name: Preparation of Papers for IEEE Access (November 2020)

[45] T. M. Mitchell, "Decision Tree learning," in Machine Learning, applications, software and data security. He particularly investigates the
ed: McGraw-Hill, 1999, pp. 52–78. applications of computing science in the areas of biomedical, health
informatics and patient privacy. He has published several research articles
in health informatics journals and conferences. mqamar@govst.edu
YOUSRA ASIM has received the BS degree in
software engineering from Fatima Jinnah Women
University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in 2006 and
MSCS degree from Kinnaird College, Lahore,
Pakistan in 2008. She has been teaching as
Lecture since 2009 and now she is working as
Assistant Professor of Computer Science in Govt.
College for Women Sihal since 2016. She is a
Ph.D. student in the CS department at COMSATS
University Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad, Pakistan. Her research interests
are Social Networks, Influential Nodes, Data Mining, Machine Learning
and Privacy. engryousraasim@gmail.com

AHMAD KAMRAN MALIK is working as an

Assistant Professor at COMSATS University
Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad, Pakistan. He
received his Ph.D. (Computer Sc.) from the
Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien),
Austria. He is author of a book and has published
a number of research papers in international
journals and conferences. His research interests
are focused on Data Science, Social Network
Analysis, and Information security. He is
interested in data analysis and prediction using Data Science techniques
particularly using graphs and networks data.
ahmad.kamran@comsats.edu.pk

BASIT RAZA is working as Assistant

Professor in the department of Computer
Science, COMSATS University Islamabad
(CUI), Islamabad, Pakistan. He received his
Ph.D. (Computer Science) degree in 2014 from
International Islamic University, Islamabad,
Pakistan. He has published a number of
conference and journal papers of internal repute.
His research interests are Database management
system, Security and Privacy, Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Machine
Learning and Artificial Intelligence. basit.raza@comsats.edu.pk

AHMAD R. SHAHID is currently working as

Assistant Professor at COMSATS University
Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad, Pakistan. He did his
PhD in Computer Science from York, UK in
2012. During his PhD he worked on
automatically building a WordNet for four
languages, namely, English, German, French and
Greek. After his PhD, he has been working in the
areas of Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. A few
of the problems that he has worked on include cancer detection, pedestrian
detection, driver fatigue detection, and data mining.
ahmadrshahid@comsats.edu.pk

NAFEES QAMAR leads the Health Informatics

programs as the Program Director and tenure-
track faculty at GSU. Dr. Qamar holds a Ph.D. in
computer science from University Grenoble
Alpes, France. He has worked as a visiting
assistant professor in the Biomedical and Health
Informatics program, Department of Computer
Science at State University of New York at
Oswego. He was also a Postdoctoral Research
Fellow and Project Manager at United Nations University, and Academic
Researcher at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. He holds an honorary
Research Fellow position at Southwest University, China. Dr. Qamar's
broad research and teaching interests include computer science

VOLUME XX, 2017 9

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/