  Influential users play an important role in online social networks since
users tend to have an impact on one other. Therefore, the proposed work
analyzes users and their behavior in order to identify influential users and
predict user participation. Normally, the success of a social media site is
dependent on the activity level of the participating users. For both online
social networking sites and individual users, it is of interest to find out if
a topic will be interesting or not. In this article, we propose association
learning to detect relationships between users. In order to verify the
findings, several experiments were executed based on social network analysis,
in which the most influential users identified from association rule learning
were compared to the results from Degree Centrality and Page Rank Centrality.
The results clearly indicate that it is possible to identify the most
influential users using association rule learning. In addition, the results
also indicate a lower execution time compared to state-of-the-art methods.
