Active Surveying

Opinion leaders play an important role in influencing people’s opinions, actions and behaviors. Although a number of methods have been proposed in literature for identifying influentials using secondary sources of information, the true set of opinion leaders revealed through primary sources, such as surveys, is still favored in many domains. In this work, we present a new active learning method, which combines secondary data with partial knowledge from primary sources, to guide the primary information gathering process. We apply our proposed active surveying method to a dataset from the pharmaceutical domain, and show how we are able to efficiently obtain the true set of opinion leaders while minimizing the required acquisition of primary data.