2022/05/29 by Yu Xing, Karl Henrik Johansson, Xing, Yu +1 · 1 citation
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.14784
openalex publication_date 2022/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study transient behavior of gossip opinion dynamics, in which agents randomly interact pairwise over a weighted graph with two communities. Edges within a community have identical weights different from edge weights between communities. We first derive an upper bound for the second moment of agent opinions. Using this bound, we obtain upper bounds for probability that a large proportion of agents have opinions close to average ones. The results imply a phase transition of transient behavior of the process: When edge weights within communities are larger than those between communities and those between regular and stubborn agents, most agents in the same community hold opinions close to the average opinion of that community with large probability, at an early stage of the process. However, if the difference between intra- and inter-community weights is small, most of the agents instead hold opinions close to everyone's average opinion at the early stage. In contrast, when the influence of stubborn agents is large, agent opinions settle quickly to steady state. We then conduct numerical experiments to validate the theoretical results. Different from traditional asymptotic analysis in most opinion dynamics literature, the paper characterizes the influences of stubborn agents and community structure on the initial phase of the opinion evolution.