Related papers: Electoral Forecasting Using a Novel Temporal Atten…
Large language models are increasingly used to predict human preferences in both scientific and business endeavors, yet current approaches rely exclusively on analyzing model outputs without considering the underlying mechanisms. Using…
We examine probabilistic forecasts for battleground states in the 2020 US presidential election, using daily data from two sources over seven months: a model published by The Economist, and prices from the PredictIt exchange. We find…
We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
The cognitive process of opinion formation is often characterized by stubbornness or resistance of agents to changes of opinion. To capture such a feature we introduce a constant latency time in the standard voter model of opinion dynamics:…
Evidence often grounds temporal probabilistic relational models over time, which makes reasoning infeasible. To counteract groundings over time and to keep reasoning polynomial by restoring a lifted representation, we present temporal…
Panels with large time $(T)$ and cross-sectional $(N)$ dimensions are a key data structure in social sciences and other fields. A central question in panel data analysis is whether to pool data across individuals or to estimate separate…
The voter model is a simple agent-based model to mimic opinion dynamics in social networks: a randomly chosen agent adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbour. This process is repeated until a consensus emerges. Although the basic…
A universal formula is shown to predict the dynamics of public opinion including eventual sudden and unexpected outbreaks of minority opinions within a generic parameter space of five dimensions. The formula is obtained combining and…
US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. There were intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of the electorate towards the achievements of the…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
Analytical approaches in models of opinion formation have been extensively studied either for an opinion represented as a discrete or a continuous variable. In this paper, we analyze a model which combines both approaches. The state of an…
We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…
Nowadays, in societies threatened by atomization, selfishness, short-term thinking, and alienation from political life, there is a renewed debate about classical questions concerning the quality of democratic decision-making. In this work a…
Data assimilation (DA) in the geophysical sciences remains the cornerstone of robust forecasts from numerical models. Indeed, DA plays a crucial role in the quality of numerical weather prediction, and is a crucial building block that has…
Predictions in digital platforms must adapt over time as individuals update their beliefs through social interactions. At the same time, changing predictions alter the content people are exposed to and, consequently, the very beliefs they…
This paper proposes a novel loss function, called 'Tube Loss', for simultaneous estimation of bounds of a Prediction Interval (PI) in the regression setup. The PIs obtained by minimizing the empirical risk based on the Tube Loss are shown…
Opinion dynamics - the research field dealing with how people's opinions form and evolve in a social context - traditionally uses agent-based models to validate the implications of sociological theories. These models encode the causal…
We propose a scalable method for constructing a temporal opinion knowledge base with large language models (LLMs) as automated annotators. Despite the demonstrated utility of time-series opinion analysis of text for downstream applications…
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…