Evaluation Without Ground Truth in Social Media Research

Scientific research demands reproducible and independently verifiable findings. The challenges introduced by humans' lack of knowledge about the future are further compounded by yearning to understand why things happen on social media. Without surveying users on social media, the gap between personal understanding and reality cannot be gauged. Practitioners and researchers alike in various fields, including statistics, computer science, sociology, psychology, epidemiology, and ethology, have developed a range of methods social media researchers can borrow and tweak in their search for reproducible evaluation methods for social media research. Consider designing a method that predicts the most likely time users will check their email messages or the restaurant they will most likely choose for dinner using their checkins, or personally reported locations, in social media.