Modeling Opinion Formation in Social Networks: A Probabilistic Fuzzy Approach

Abstract

Opinion formation in social networks is an interesting dynamical process from the perspective of system modeling due to its large scale as well as the variety of structural and parametric uncertainties that it entails. This paper proposes a probabilistic fuzzy opinion formation model for predicting the opinions of communities in the social networks. In this regard, the opinions of a group of individuals about a given topic in a Telegram pilot group, as a popular social network, are collected and presented in the framework of the probabilistic fuzzy model. Based on the obtained data, the parameters of the model are extracted, and the model is tuned. Finally, the variations of the actual opinions throughout time are compared with the model predictions. The numerical results in this study show that, with appropriately tuned parameters, the model successfully represents the opinion formation process, with an average error that approaches zero.