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Opinion dynamics in social networks / by Qi Gu.

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Author	Gu, Qi.
Title	Opinion dynamics in social networks / by Qi Gu.
Date	2014
Abstract	Opinion dynamics is a complex procedure that entails a cognitive process when it deals with how a person integrates influential opinions to form revised opinion. Early research on opinion formation and social influence can be traced back to the eighteenth century. The original research focus was to study the conditions for people to aggregate information and reach consensus. Recently, due to the rise of the World Wide Web more and more studies tend to model opinion dynamics in large-scale social networks via computational methods. Among those works, non-Bayesian rule-of-thumb learning models keep gaining popularity due to their simplicity and computational efficiency. Unlike many non-Bayesian methods that treat individual opinions on various issues as independent beliefs but overlook the connections between knowledge fragments, we leverage from Bayesian approaches to consider opinions as a product inferred from one's knowledge-based system, where new knowledge fragments are acquired through social interaction and learning experiences. We study how an individual evaluates and adopts such knowledge fragments from others sources, both visible and invisible, on the basis of the findings from well-established social theories. A computational framework was developed to model opinion dynamics, in which we applied a probabilistic model named Bayesian Knowledge Bases to represent an individual's knowledge base. Opinion dynamics is studied by modeling opinion formation as a process of knowledge fusion, learning the impact metric that estimates the reliability of knowledge fragments, and identifying influential sources whose impact patterns are hidden. The contributions of this work can be summarized as 1) the development of a domain-independent computational method to model opinion formation by emphasizing the dependencies between knowledge pieces, 2) the capability to model different aspects of opinion dynamics in one entire system, 3) the intuitiveness in representing opinions such that the intents behind the opinion change can be readily captured, 4) the ability to characterize the influences in a social community by realizing and enriching theories of social communication, and 5) the flexibility of application on detecting and tracking hidden influential sources.
Description	ix, 134 leaves : ill. (some col.)
Format	application/pdf
College	Thayer School of Engineering.
Issuing Body	Dartmouth Dissertations are made available through the Dartmouth Digital Library.
Degree	Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dartmouth College.
Copyright	All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the author.
DOI	http://dx.doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.1214

Title	Page 1
Full Text	Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Qi Gu Thayer School of Engineering Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire April 2014 Examining Committee: Chairman Eugene Santos, Jr. Member George Cybenko Member Mark Borsuk Member Hien Nguyen F. Jon Kull Dean of Graduate Studies

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Opinion dynamics in social networks / by Qi Gu.

Opinion dynamics in social networks / by Qi Gu.