Utilizing Big Data and Twitter to Discover Emergent Online Communities of Cannabis Users.

ABSTRACT: Large shifts in medical, recreational, and illicit cannabis consumption in the United States have implications for personalizing treatment and prevention programs to a wide variety of populations. As such, considerable research has investigated clinical presentations of cannabis users in clinical and population-based samples. Studies leveraging big data, social media, and social network analysis have emerged as a promising mechanism to generate timely insights that can inform treatment and prevention research. This study extends a novel method called stochastic block modeling to derive communities of cannabis consumers as part of a complex social network on Twitter. A set of examples illustrate how this method can ascertain candidate samples of medical, recreational, and illicit cannabis u

SUBMITTER: Baumgartner P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5462814 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature