Analyzing twitter user- generated content changes

User-generated content (UGC) coming from social networks and online communities continuously grows and changes. By analyzing relevant patterns from the UGC, analysts may discover peculiar user behaviors and interests which can be used to personalize Web-oriented applications. In the last several years, the use of dynamic mining techniques has captured the interest of the research community. They are focused on analyzing the temporal evolution of most significant correlations hidden in the analyzed data. However, keeping track of all temporal data correlations relevant for user behaviors, community interests, and topic trend analysts may become a challenging task due to the sparseness of the analyzed data. This chapter presents a novel data mining system that performs dynamic itemset mining from both the content and the contextual features of the messages posted on Twitter. Dynamic itemsets represent the evolution of data correlations over time. The framework exploits a dynamic itemset mining algorithm, named HiGen Miner, to discover relevant temporal data correlations from a stream of tweet collections. In particular, it extracts compact patterns, namely the HiGens, that represent the evolution of the most relevant itemsets over consecutive time periods at different abstraction levels. A taxonomy is used to drive the mining process and prevent the discarding of knowledge that becomes infrequent in a certain time period. Experiments, performed on real Twitter posts, show the effectiveness and the usability of the proposed system in supporting Twitter user behavior and topic trend analysis.