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Role of conformity in opinion dynamics in social networks

Published: 01 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Social networks serve as important platforms for users to express, exchange and form opinions on various topics. Several opinion dynamics models have been proposed to characterize how a user iteratively updates her expressed opinion based on her innate opinion and the opinion of her neighbors. The extent to how much a user is influenced by her neighboring opinions, as opposed to her own innate opinion, is governed by a measure of her 'conformity' parameter. Characterizing this degree of conformity for users of a social network is critical for several applications such as debiasing online surveys and finding social influencers. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating these conformity values for users, using only the expressed opinions and the social graph. We pose this problem in a constrained optimization framework and design efficient algorithms, which we validate on both synthetic and real-world Twitter data. Using these estimated conformity values, we then address the problem of identifying the smallest subset of users in a social graph that, when seeded initially with some non-neutral opinions, can accurately explain the current opinion values of users in the entire social graph. We call this problem seed recovery. Using ideas from compressed sensing, we analyze and design algorithms for both conformity estimation and seed recovery, and validate them on real and synthetic data.

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  • (2024)Wiser than the Wisest of Crowds: The Asch Effect and Polarization RevisitedMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Research Track10.1007/978-3-031-70362-1_26(440-458)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Inference in Opinion Dynamics Under Social PressureIEEE Transactions on Automatic Control10.1109/TAC.2022.319179168:6(3377-3392)Online publication date: Jun-2023
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    COSN '14: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Online social networks
    October 2014
    288 pages
    ISBN:9781450331982
    DOI:10.1145/2660460
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 01 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. conformity
    2. opinion formation
    3. social networks

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    COSN'14: Conference on Online Social Networks
    October 1 - 2, 2014
    Dublin, Ireland

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    COSN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 87 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 307 submissions, 22%

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    • (2024)Wiser than the Wisest of Crowds: The Asch Effect and Polarization RevisitedMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Research Track10.1007/978-3-031-70362-1_26(440-458)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
    • (2023)Inference in Opinion Dynamics Under Social PressureIEEE Transactions on Automatic Control10.1109/TAC.2022.319179168:6(3377-3392)Online publication date: Jun-2023
    • (2023)Systematic Literature Review of Social Media interactions2023 3rd International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME)10.1109/ICECCME57830.2023.10252420(1-4)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Voting-based Opinion Maximization2023 IEEE 39th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE55515.2023.00048(544-557)Online publication date: Apr-2023
    • (2023)Stochastic Opinion Dynamics Under Social Pressure in Arbitrary Networks2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)10.1109/CDC49753.2023.10383923(1360-1366)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Robust Opinion Control Under Network PerturbationIEEE Signal Processing Letters10.1109/LSP.2022.319303929(1649-1653)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2021)Opinion Dynamics Optimization by Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion via Non-Convex Local SearchACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data10.1145/346661716:2(1-34)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2021
    • (2021)Over a decade of social opinion mining: a systematic reviewArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-021-10030-254:7(4873-4965)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021
    • (2019)ONE-M: Modeling the Co-evolution of Opinions and Network ConnectionsMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases10.1007/978-3-030-10928-8_8(122-140)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2019
    • (2018)Opinion Dynamics with Varying Susceptibility to PersuasionProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining10.1145/3219819.3219983(1089-1098)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2018
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