Researcher ORCID Identifier
Graduation Year
2022
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science
Department
Mathematics
Reader 1
Heather Z. Brooks
Reader 2
Andrew Bernoff
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2022 Phousawanh G. Peaungvongpakdy
Abstract
Models of opinion dynamics have been used to understand how the spread
of information in a population evolves, such as the classical Hegselmann–
Krause model (Hegselmann and Krause, 2002). One extension of the model
has been used to study the impact of media ideology on social media
networks (Brooks and Porter, 2020). In this thesis, we explore various
models of opinions and propose our own model, which is an adaptive
version of the Hegselmann–Krause model. The adaptive version implements
the social phenomenon of homophily—the tendency for like-minded agents to
associate together. This is done by having agents dissolve connections if their
opinions are too different from one another and establish new connections
probabilistically, with it being more likely to establish a connection with an
agent with a similar opinion to theirs. We study how our model changes
with various values of the parameters in the model, namely the confidence
parameter and homophily parameter, as well as different initial graph
topologies and varying the number of nodes in the graph.
Recommended Citation
Peaungvongpakdy, Phousawanh, "An Adaptive Hegselmann–Krause Model of Opinion Dynamics" (2022). HMC Senior Theses. 262.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmc_theses/262
