Related papers: Dealing with correlated choices: How a spin-glass …
Several recent experiments in biology study systems composed of several interacting elements, for example neuron networks. Normally, measurements describe only the collective behavior of the system, even if in most cases we would like to…
The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…
In this work a short overview of the development of spin glass theories, mainly long and short range Ising models, are presented.
The voter model consists of a set of agents whose opinion is a binary variable. At each time step, an agent along with a social neighbor is selected and the agent imitates the social neighbor at the next time step. In this paper, we study a…
Several cases of the Sznajd model of socio-physics, that only a group of people sharing the same opinion can convince their neighbors, have been simulated on a more realistic network with a stronger clustering. In addition, many opinions,…
The act of explaining across two parties is a feedback loop, where one provides information on what needs to be explained and the other provides an explanation relevant to this information. We apply a reinforcement learning framework which…
Spin-glasses are universal models that can capture complex behavior of many-body systems at the interface of statistical physics and computer science including discrete optimization, inference in graphical models, and automated reasoning.…
Governments around the world aspire to ground decision-making on evidence. Many of the foundations of policy making - e.g. sensing patterns that relate to societal needs, developing evidence-based programs, forecasting potential outcomes of…
Inference and learning of graphical models are both well-studied problems in statistics and machine learning that have found many applications in science and engineering. However, exact inference is intractable in general graphical models,…
A simple Ising spin model which can describe a mechanism of making a decision in a closed community is proposed. It is shown via standard Monte Carlo simulations that very simple rules lead to rather complicated dynamics and to a power law…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
Social media users express their political preferences via interaction with other users, by spontaneous declarations or by participation in communities within the network. This makes a social network such as Twitter a valuable data source…
As a schematic model of the complexity economic agents are confronted with, we introduce the ``SK-game'', a discrete time binary choice model inspired from mean-field spin-glasses. We show that even in a completely static environment,…
Here we present \texttt{electoral\_sim}, an open-source Python framework for simulating and comparing electoral systems across diverse voter preference distributions. The framework represents voters and candidates as points in a…
Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
We introduce a new Ising-type framework for opinion dynamics that explicitly separates private preferences from publicly expressed binary opinions and naturally incorporates neutral agents. Each individual is endowed with an immutable…
This chapter reviews the purpose and use of models from the field of complex systems and, in particular, the implications of trying to use models to understand or make decisions within complex situations, such as policy makers usually face.…
The study of spin-glass dynamics, long considered the paradigmatic complex system, has reached important milestones. The availability of single crystals has allowed the experimental measurement of spin-glass coherence lengths of almost…