English

Majority dynamics on trees and the dynamic cavity method

Probability 2011-12-30 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

A voter sits on each vertex of an infinite tree of degree kk, and has to decide between two alternative opinions. At each time step, each voter switches to the opinion of the majority of her neighbors. We analyze this majority process when opinions are initialized to independent and identically distributed random variables. In particular, we bound the threshold value of the initial bias such that the process converges to consensus. In order to prove an upper bound, we characterize the process of a single node in the large kk-limit. This approach is inspired by the theory of mean field spin-glass and can potentially be generalized to a wider class of models. We also derive a lower bound that is nontrivial for small, odd values of kk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0907.0449,
  title  = {Majority dynamics on trees and the dynamic cavity method},
  author = {Yashodhan Kanoria and Andrea Montanari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0907.0449},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AAP729 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:20:40.428Z