Collection, Exploration and Analysis of Crowdfunding Social Networks

Miao  Cheng; Anand  Sriramulu; Sudarshan  Muralidhar; Boon Thau  Loo; Laura  Huang; Po-Ling  Loh

Article | Proceedings of the International Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web

Collection, Exploration and Analysis of Crowdfunding Social Networks

by Miao Cheng, Anand Sriramulu, Sudarshan Muralidhar, Boon Thau Loo, Laura Huang and Po-Ling Loh

Abstract

Crowdfunding is a recent financing phenomenon that is gaining wide popularity as a means for startups to raise seed funding for their companies. This paper presents our initial results at understanding this phenomenon using an exploratory data driven approach. We have developed a big data platform for collecting and managing data from multiple sources, including company profiles (CrunchBase and AngelList) and social networks (Facebook and Twitter). We describe our data collection process that allows us to gather data from diverse sources at high throughput. Using Spark as our analysis tool, we study the impact of social engagement on startup fund raising success. We further define novel metrics that allow us to quantify the behavior of investors to follow and make investment decisions as communities rather than individuals. Finally, we explore visualization techniques that allow us to visualize communities of investors that make decisions in a close-knit fashion vs looser communities where investors largely make independent decisions. We conclude with a discussion on our ongoing research on causality analysis and new community detection algorithms.

Format: Electronic

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Citation:

Cheng, Miao, Anand Sriramulu, Sudarshan Muralidhar, Boon Thau Loo, Laura Huang, and Po-Ling Loh. "Collection, Exploration and Analysis of Crowdfunding Social Networks." Proceedings of the International Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web 3rd (2016): 25–30.

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Collection, Exploration and Analysis of Crowdfunding Social Networks

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