A Social Diffusion Model with an Application on Election Simulation

Issues about opinion diffusion have been studied for decades. It has so far no empirical approach to model the interflow and formation of crowd’s opinion in elections due to two reasons. First, unlike the spread of information or flu, individuals have their intrinsic attitudes to election candidates...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jing-Kai Lou, Fu-Min Wang, Chin-Hua Tsai, San-Chuan Hung, Perng-Hwa Kung, Shou-De Lin, Kuan-Ta Chen, Chin-Laung Lei
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2014-01-01
Series:The Scientific World Journal
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/180590
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Summary:Issues about opinion diffusion have been studied for decades. It has so far no empirical approach to model the interflow and formation of crowd’s opinion in elections due to two reasons. First, unlike the spread of information or flu, individuals have their intrinsic attitudes to election candidates in advance. Second, opinions are generally simply assumed as single values in most diffusion models. However, in this case, an opinion should represent preference toward multiple candidates. Previously done models thus may not intuitively interpret such scenario. This work is to design a diffusion model which is capable of managing the aforementioned scenario. To demonstrate the usefulness of our model, we simulate the diffusion on the network built based on a publicly available bibliography dataset. We compare the proposed model with other well-known models such as independent cascade. It turns out that our model consistently outperforms other models. We additionally investigate electoral issues with our model simulator.
ISSN:2356-6140
1537-744X