Echo Chambers and Segregation in Social Networks: Markov Bridge Models and Estimation

Abstract

This article deals with the modeling and estimation of the sociological phenomena called echo chambers and segregation in social networks. Specifically, we present a novel community-based graph model that represents the emergence of segregated echo chambers as a Markov bridge (MB) process. An MB is a 1-D Markov random field that facilitates modeling the formation and disassociation of communities at deterministic times, which is important in social networks with known timed events. We justify the proposed model with real-world examples and examine its performance on a recent Twitter dataset. We provide a model parameter estimation algorithm based on maximum likelihood and a Bayesian filtering algorithm for recursively estimating the level of segregation using noisy samples obtained from the network. Numerical results indicate that the proposed filtering algorithm outperforms the conventional hidden Markov modeling in terms of the mean-squared error. The proposed filtering method is useful in computational social science where data-driven estimation of the level of segregation from noisy data is required.