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Register a new userA Distance Measure for the Analysis of Polar Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks
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Added by
Victor Amelkin
Publication date
2015
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Analysis of opinion dynamics in social networks plays an important role in todays life. For applications such as predicting users political preference, it is particularly important to be able to analyze the dynamics of competing opinions. While observing the evolution of polar opinions of a social networks users over time, can we tell when the network behaved abnormally? Furthermore, can we predict how the opinions of the users will change in the future? Do opinions evolve according to existing network opinion dynamics models? To answer such questions, it is not sufficient to study individual user behavior, since opinions can spread far beyond users egonets. We need a method to analyze opinion dynamics of all network users simultaneously and capture the effect of individuals behavior on the global evolution pattern of the social network. In this work, we introduce Social Network Distance (SND) - a distance measure that quantifies the cost of evolution of one snapshot of a social network into another snapshot under various models of polar opinion propagation. SND has a rich semantics of a transportation problem, yet, is computable in time linear in the number of users, which makes SND applicable to the analysis of large-scale online social networks. In our experiments with synthetic and real-world Twitter data, we demonstrate the utility of our distance measure for anomalous event detection. It achieves a true positive rate of 0.83, twice as high as that of alternatives. When employed for opinion prediction in Twitter, our methods accuracy is 75.63%, which is 7.5% higher than that of the next best method. Source Code: https://cs.ucsb.edu/~victor/pub/ucsb/dbl/snd/
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We propose a setting for two-phase opinion dynamics in social networks, where a nodes final opinion in the first phase acts as its initial biased opinion in the second phase. In this setting, we study the problem of two camps aiming to maximize adoption of their respective opinions, by strategically investing on nodes in the two phases. A nodes initial opinion in the second phase naturally plays a key role in determining the final opinion of that node, and hence also of other nodes in the network due to its influence on them. More importantly, this bias also determines the effectiveness of a camps investment on that node in the second phase. To formalize this two-phase investment setting, we propose an extension of Friedkin-Johnsen model, and hence formulate the utility functions of the camps. There is a tradeoff while splitting the budget between the two phases. A lower investment in the first phase results in worse initial biases for the second phase, while a higher investment spares a lower available budget for the second phase. We first analyze the non-competitive case where only one camp invests, for which we present a polynomial time algorithm for determining an optimal way to split the camps budget between the two phases. We then analyze the case of competing camps, where we show the existence of Nash equilibrium and that it can be computed in polynomial time under reasonable assumptions. We conclude our study with simulations on real-world network datasets, in order to quantify the effects of the initial biases and the weightage attributed by nodes to their initial biases, as well as that of a camp deviating from its equilibrium strategy. Our main conclusion is that, if nodes attribute high weightage to their initial biases, it is advantageous to have a high investment in the first phase, so as to effectively influence the biases to be harnessed in the second phase.
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