Data Mining for Social Network Pattern Recognition: A case study of TikTok in Saudi Arabia

At the moment, the opportunities offered by social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Snapchat are driving their popularity. In November 2023, with over 1 billion active users every month, TikTok was the most popular and prominent social media platform in the world. With 137.6% of users being under the age of 25 (students), Saudi Arabia ranks second among nations in terms of TikTok usage. There are 35.10 million TikTok users in Saudi Arabia. As a consequence of TikTok's success and the many opportunities offered by social media platforms, new web-based applications for social networks have emerged, and uncharted territories have been discovered. As a result, while deciding how to build and deploy these apps and instructional resources, it could be helpful to examine social media usage habits. In this study, we analyse survey data from 1098 TikTok users to identify the factors that affect "TikTok usage time" and "TikTok access frequency" using multiple predictive data mining methods. We use the association rules method to look at how students feel about the educational benefits of TikTok.