Analysis and Control of Beliefs in Social Networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of how beliefs diffuse among members of social networks. We propose an information flow model (IFM) of belief that captures how interactions among members affect the diffusion and eventual convergence of a belief. The IFM model includes a generalized Markov Graph (GMG) model as a social network model, which reveals that the diffusion of beliefs depends heavily on two characteristics of the social network characteristics, namely degree centralities and clustering coefficients. We apply the IFM to both converged belief estimation and belief control strategy optimization. The model is compared with an IFM including the Barabasi-Albert model, and is evaluated via experiments with published real social network data.