What network topology can tell in election prediction

Abstract

With the advent of big data era, it is more and more acceptable that the topology of a network can reveal more than we can conceive. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to predict a winner of an election among several competitors based on the relationships of individuals in a social network. Convergence is proved and an extensive experiment is done to show the effectiveness of the algorithm. Our algorithm can also be used to identify members of different parties in a fairly reasonable manner. Furthermore, our algorithm is merely based on the topology of the network, which saves us a large amount of work from collecting voting intentions and executing data pre-processing.