Classifying Social Media Users with Machine Learning

[Objective] This paper uses multi-dimensional information of social media users to automatically classify them. [Methods] First, we defined social media users as individual, media, government, and organization. Then, we extracted the following features from user profiles: demographic characteristics, namings, and self-descriptions. Third, we created a user classification models based on machine learning algorithms and evaluated its performance with real Twitter dataset. [Results] Both precision and recall of the proposed model were greater than 83%. The naming, demographic characteristics, and self-description features posed increasing contributions to the classification model. [Limitations] The sample size needs to be expanded, which helps us better analyzed the characteristics of different users. [Conclusions] The proposed method could accurately identify four types of users, which benefits social media user classification research in the future. © 2019 The Author(s).