Voter model can accurately predict individual opinions in online populations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Vendeville, Antoine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Vendeville, Antoine
author_facet Vendeville, Antoine
contents Models of opinion dynamics describe how opinions are shaped in various environments. While these models are able to replicate general opinion distributions observed in real-world scenarios, their capacity to align with data at the user level remains mostly untested. We evaluate the capacity of the multi-state voter model with zealots to capture individual opinions in a fine-grained Twitter dataset collected during the 2017 French Presidential elections. Our findings reveal a strong correspondence between individual opinion distributions in the equilibrium state of the model and ground-truth political leanings of the users. Additionally, we demonstrate that discord probabilities accurately identify pairs of like-minded users. These results emphasize the validity of the voter model in complex settings, and advocate for further empirical evaluations of opinion dynamics models at the user level.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_13215
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Voter model can accurately predict individual opinions in online populations
Vendeville, Antoine
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Models of opinion dynamics describe how opinions are shaped in various environments. While these models are able to replicate general opinion distributions observed in real-world scenarios, their capacity to align with data at the user level remains mostly untested. We evaluate the capacity of the multi-state voter model with zealots to capture individual opinions in a fine-grained Twitter dataset collected during the 2017 French Presidential elections. Our findings reveal a strong correspondence between individual opinion distributions in the equilibrium state of the model and ground-truth political leanings of the users. Additionally, we demonstrate that discord probabilities accurately identify pairs of like-minded users. These results emphasize the validity of the voter model in complex settings, and advocate for further empirical evaluations of opinion dynamics models at the user level.
title Voter model can accurately predict individual opinions in online populations
topic Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13215