ONE-M: Modeling the co-evolution of opinions and network connections

Abstract

How do opinions of individuals on controversial issues such as marijuana and gay marriage and their underlying social network connections evolve over time? Do people alter their network to have more like-minded friends or do they change their own opinions? Does the society eventually develop echo chambers? In this paper, we study dynamically evolving networks and changing user opinions to answer these questions. Our contributions are as follows: (a) Discovering Evolution of Polarization in Networks: We present evidence of growing divide among users based on their opinions who eventually form homophilic groups (b) Studying Opinion and Network Co-Evolution: We present observations of how individuals change opinions and position themselves in dynamically changing networks (c) Forecasting Persistence and Change in Opinions and Network: We propose ONE-M to forecast individual beliefs and persistence or dissolution of social ties. Using a unique real-world network dataset including periodic user surveys, we show that ONE-M performs with high accuracy, while outperforming the baseline approaches. Code related to this paper is available at: https://github.com/anigam/ONE-M and Data related to this paper is available at: http://netsense.nd.edu/.