Exploiting evolving trust relationships in the modelling of opinion formation dynamics in online social networks
- Authors: Das, Rajkumar , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Karmakar, Gour
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings , Conference paper
- Relation: 31st IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, AINA 2017; Taipei, Taiwan; 27th-29th March 2017 p. 872-879
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Mass participation of the members of a society in discussions to resolve issues related to a topic leads to forming public opinion. The timeline of the underlying dynamics goes through several distinguishable phases, and experiences transition from one to another. After initiated by concerned individuals, it draws active attention from almost everyone, and with time progression, people's participation starts declining as the issues are resolved or lost attraction. The existing works in the literature to capture the opinion formation process pay attention to model the dynamics in its active phase and thus ignore the other phases and the corresponding phase transitions. Trust relationships among the participants dynamically shape their interactions in different stages of the dynamics. Existing works fail to incorporate trust in defining the extent of influence one has on others, as they define the social relationships in the opinion space. To address this issue, we adopt simulated annealing to model the transitional behaviour of the dynamics, and then, amalgamate peoples relationships in the trust space with that in the opinion space to define the meta-heuristics of the algorithm for capturing the dynamical properties of the process. Finally, through simulation, we observe that our model is insightful in representing peoples' evolving behaviour in the different stages of opinion formation process, and consequently, can capture the various properties of the steady-state outcomes of the dynamics. © 2017 IEEE.
- Description: Proceedings - International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, AINA
Who are convincing? An experience based opinion formation dynamics in online social networks
- Authors: Das, Rajkumar , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Karmakar, Gour
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings , Conference paper
- Relation: 30th European Simulation and Modelling Conference, ESM 2016; Las Palmas, Spain; 26th-28th October 2016 p. 167-173
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Online social network (OSN) is one of the major platforms where our opinions are formed now-a-days and increasing so. Opinion formation dynamics captures the ways public opinions are formed, mainly from two different sources, (i) neighbours' opinions, (ii) external opinions from sources other than the neighbours. In this paper, we formulate an opinion formation model by considering two very important factors, that were ignored or a very little explored in the literature. First, we model the convincing power of the opinions encountered from the two sources. Second, we incorporate the experience of users' previous interactions with the two opinion sources. The problem is formulated as an agent based model where each member of an OSN is represented with an agent and their relationships with a graph. Finally through simulation, we create various scenarios, and apply our model to observe the steady state outcomes of the dynamics. This helps us to study the nature of the public opinions under various influences of our model parameters.
- Description: European Simulation and Modelling Conference 2016, ESM 2016