16 research outputs found
Learning and Forecasting Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks
Social media and social networking sites have become a global pinboard for
exposition and discussion of news, topics, and ideas, where social media users
often update their opinions about a particular topic by learning from the
opinions shared by their friends. In this context, can we learn a data-driven
model of opinion dynamics that is able to accurately forecast opinions from
users? In this paper, we introduce SLANT, a probabilistic modeling framework of
opinion dynamics, which represents users opinions over time by means of marked
jump diffusion stochastic differential equations, and allows for efficient
model simulation and parameter estimation from historical fine grained event
data. We then leverage our framework to derive a set of efficient predictive
formulas for opinion forecasting and identify conditions under which opinions
converge to a steady state. Experiments on data gathered from Twitter show that
our model provides a good fit to the data and our formulas achieve more
accurate forecasting than alternatives
Opinion dynamics with backfire effect and biased assimilation
The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This raises the question of how individual opinions evolve in such a networked environment without grounding in a known reality. The dominant approach to studying this problem uses simple models from the social sciences on how individuals change their opinions when exposed to their social neighborhood, and applies them on large social networks.
We propose a novel model that incorporates two known social phenomena: (i) Biased Assimilation: the tendency of individuals to adopt other opinions if they are similar to their own; (ii) Backfire Effect: the fact that an opposite opinion may further entrench someone in their stance, making their opinion more extreme instead of moderating it. To the best of our knowledge this is the first DeGroot-type opinion formation model that captures the Backfire Effect. A thorough theoretical and empirical analysis of the proposed model reveals intuitive conditions for polarization and consensus to exist, as well as the properties of the resulting opinions
Distilling Information Reliability and Source Trustworthiness from Digital Traces
Online knowledge repositories typically rely on their users or dedicated
editors to evaluate the reliability of their content. These evaluations can be
viewed as noisy measurements of both information reliability and information
source trustworthiness. Can we leverage these noisy evaluations, often biased,
to distill a robust, unbiased and interpretable measure of both notions?
In this paper, we argue that the temporal traces left by these noisy
evaluations give cues on the reliability of the information and the
trustworthiness of the sources. Then, we propose a temporal point process
modeling framework that links these temporal traces to robust, unbiased and
interpretable notions of information reliability and source trustworthiness.
Furthermore, we develop an efficient convex optimization procedure to learn the
parameters of the model from historical traces. Experiments on real-world data
gathered from Wikipedia and Stack Overflow show that our modeling framework
accurately predicts evaluation events, provides an interpretable measure of
information reliability and source trustworthiness, and yields interesting
insights about real-world events.Comment: Accepted at 26th World Wide Web conference (WWW-17
SIAM Data Mining Brings It to Annual Meeting
The Data Mining Activity Group is one of SIAM\u27s most vibrant and dynamic activity groups. To better share our enthusiasm for data mining with the broader SIAM community, our activity group organized six minisymposia at the 2016 Annual Meeting. These minisymposia included 48 talks organized by 11 SIAM members on - GraphBLAS (Aydın Buluç) - Algorithms and statistical methods for noisy network analysis (Sanjukta Bhowmick & Ben Miller) - Inferring networks from non-network data (Rajmonda Caceres, Ivan Brugere & Tanya Y. Berger-Wolf) - Visual analytics (Jordan Crouser) - Mining in graph data (Jennifer Webster, Mahantesh Halappanavar & Emilie Hogan) - Scientific computing and big data (Vijay Gadepally) These minisymposia were well received by the broader SIAM community, and below are some of the key highlights