  Social media anomaly detection is of critical importance to prevent malicious
activities such as bullying, terrorist attack planning, and fraud information
dissemination. With the recent popularity of social media, new types of
anomalous behaviors arise, causing concerns from various parties. While a large
amount of work have been dedicated to traditional anomaly detection problems,
we observe a surge of research interests in the new realm of social media
anomaly detection. In this paper, we present a survey on existing approaches to
address this problem. We focus on the new type of anomalous phenomena in the
social media and review the recent developed techniques to detect those special
types of anomalies. We provide a general overview of the problem domain, common
formulations, existing methodologies and potential directions. With this work,
we hope to call out the attention from the research community on this
challenging problem and open up new directions that we can contribute in the
future.
