Department Seminar Series

Granular DeGroot Dynamics: A Model for Robust Naive Learning in Social Networks

21st February 2023, 13:00 add to calenderAshton Lecture Theatre
Dr. Galit Ashkenazi-Golan
Department of Mathematics, London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract

We study a model of opinion exchange in social networks where a state of the world is realized and every agent receives a zero-mean noisy signal of the realized state. It is known from Golub and Jackson that under DeGroot dynamics agents reach a consensus that is close to the state of the world when the network is large. The DeGroot dynamics, however, is highly non-robust and the presence of a single “stubborn agent” that does not adhere to the updating rule can sway the public consensus to any other value. We introduce a variant of DeGroot dynamics that we call 1/m-DeGroot. 1/m-DeGroot dynamics approximates standard DeGroot dynamics to the nearest rational number with m as its denominator and like the DeGroot dynamics it is Markovian and stationary. We show that in contrast to standard DeGroot dynamics, 1/m-DeGroot dynamics is highly robust both to the presence of stubborn agents and to certain types of misspecifications.

Based on joint work with Gidi Amir (Bar-Ilan university), Itai Arieli (Technion) & Ron Peretz (Bar-Ilan University)

add to calender (including abstract)