A neural probabilistic bounded confidence model for opinion dynamics on social networks

Abstract

Opinion dynamics (OD) models simulate the evolution of personal opinions using computer science, social dynamics, physics, and complexity science tools on social networks. However, current opinion dynamics models mainly utilize agent-based models to simulate user interactions but still need to leverage large-scale data fully. Social networks typically involve a vast number of users and information, making it difficult for models to capture the complex interactions in real social networks. Additionally, many models overlook the specific mechanisms of user interactions, such as how network individuals influence and interact with one another, resulting in inaccuracies in modeling individual opinion evolution. This paper proposes a novel approach that integrates the probabilistic bounded confidence model (PBC) with deep learning, i.e., Neural Probabilistic Bounded Confidence (NPBC), to tackle these challenges. The NPBC model adopts an attention network, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, and a feedforward neural network to approximate the evolution of individual opinions within networks. It satisfies the data approximation and the users’ opinion update rule that conforms to the PBC model. This model enhances the understanding of opinion dynamics, helping to develop effective strategies for opinion guidance in social networks. Finally, the proposed NPBC model is evaluated on three synthetic and Twitter datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed NPBC model performs better than the six baseline methods in predicting user opinions. Compared to baseline models, the model’s accuracy (ACC) and comprehensive evaluation (F1) scores improve by up to 18% and 7%, respectively.