论文标题
预测社区,回声室和多个政党在场的投票结果
Predicting Voting Outcomes in the Presence of Communities, Echo Chambers and Multiple Parties
论文作者
论文摘要
最近提出的一个图理论指标,即影响差距,已证明是两方选举中社会影响力的可靠预测指标,尽管仅在常规和无标度图上进行了测试。在这里,我们研究了影响差距是否能够预测表现出社区结构的网络的多方选举的结果,即由高度相互联系的组件制成,因此更类似于现实世界的相互作用。为了编码社区,我们建立在穴居人图的经典模型上,我们将其扩展到一个更丰富的图形家族,该家族显示出不同级别的同质级别,即交织了多少连接和观点。首先,我们研究了社区在场的影响差距的预测能力。我们表明,如果没有明确的初始多数,影响差距并不是选举结果的良好预测指标。当我们允许不同的多数人允许的情况下,尽管影响差距会改善作为预测指标,但在所有层次的同质层面上,最初的党派多数始终如一地更好。其次,我们研究了更具预测性指标的综合效应,作为同质水平的功能。使用回归模型,我们证明了影响差距与初始投票数相结合的确实会增加某些同质水平的总体预测能力。第三,我们研究了有两个以上政党的选举。具体而言,我们将影响差距的定义扩展到任何数量的当事方,考虑到各种概括,并表明,与影响差距相比,初始投票数量比在两党案例中具有更高的预测能力。
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether the influence gap is able to predict the outcome of multi-party elections on networks exhibiting community structure, i.e., made of highly interconnected components, and therefore more resembling of real-world interaction. To encode communities we build on the classical model of caveman graphs, which we extend to a richer graph family that displays different levels of homophily, i.e., how much connections and opinions are intertwined. First, we study the predictive power of the influence gap in the presence of communities. We show that when there is no clear initial majority the influence gap is not a good predictor of the election outcome. When we instead allow for varying majorities, although the influence gap improves as a predictor, counting the initial partisan majority does consistently better, across all levels of homophily. Second, we study the combined effect of the more predictive metrics, as function of the homophily levels. Using regression models, we demonstrate that the influence gap combined with the initial votes count does increase the overall predictive power for some levels of homophily. Third, we study elections with more than two parties. Specifically, we extend the definition of the influence gap to any number of parties, considering various generalisations, and show that the initial votes count has an even higher predictive power when compared to influence gap than it did in the two-party case.