title: A social diffusion model with an application on election simulation.
abstract: Issues about opinion diffusion have been studied for decades. It has so far no empirical approach to model the interflow and formation of crowd's opinion in elections due to two reasons. First, unlike the spread of information or flu, individuals have their intrinsic attitudes to election candidates in advance. Second, opinions are generally simply assumed as single values in most diffusion models. However, in this case, an opinion should represent preference toward multiple candidates. Previously done models thus may not intuitively interpret such scenario. This work is to design a diffusion model which is capable of managing the aforementioned scenario. To demonstrate the usefulness of our model, we simulate the diffusion on the network built based on a publicly available bibliography dataset. We compare the proposed model with other well-known models such as independent cascade. It turns out that our model consistently outperforms other models. We additionally investigate electoral issues with our model simulator.
authors.affiliation: Institute of information Science, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Section 2, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan ; Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Jing-Kai
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0004-739X
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Lou
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Fu-Min
authors.initials: FM
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chin-Hua
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2318-4327
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Tsai
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: San-Chuan
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Hung
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Perng-Hwa
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Kung
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Shou-De
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Institute of information Science, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Section 2, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Kuan-Ta
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5333-7972
authors.initials: KT
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chin-Laung
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9011-5025
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Lei
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011057:Politics; D012944:Social Support