Editorial

In recent years, we have been witnessing the truly remarkable phenomenon of social networks, which have emerged as a new way of modern Web-based communication. By generating enormously large volumes of data, social networks have triggered a great deal of interest both among the research community of data mining and knowledge discovery and professionals directly involved in delivering technologies and services of social networks. Social networks, along with their diversified media, have brought to existence a vast array of unique and far-reaching opportunities, as well as inevitable challenges. Those have been manifesting at both the conceptual and technological level. To fully unleash the potential of social networks while minimizing any adverse effects and alleviate possible pitfalls, innovative and efficient solutions become extremely timely. WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery has been at the forefront of disseminating current, comprehensive reviews of the pioneering research that is being done on data mining. Now, a new initiative has been launched. It comes in the form of collections of prudently organized and authoritative studies on data mining and social networks. The ultimate objective behind this new initiative is to offer the reader a curated set of articles spanning across a broad spectrum of topics that are arranged in a useful and meaningful way to address the vital issues of social networks from the perspective of data mining. The collection demonstrates a comprehensive analysis of networks and looks at the complex patterns of dynamics resulting in communities and calling for their mining, identifying leader formations, discovering patterns of interactions, and studying sentiment mining. Other articles discuss the associated problems of identity management, coping with fake identities, detection of fake news, credibility assessment, and deceptive engagement. I hope that all of our readers will find this collection interesting and educational.