Learning Graph Influence from Social Interactions (2002.04946v1)

Abstract: In social learning, agents form their opinions or beliefs about certain hypotheses by exchanging local information. This work considers the recent paradigm of weak graphs, where the network is partitioned into sending and receiving components, with the former having the possibility of exerting a domineering effect on the latter. Such graph structures are prevalent over social platforms. We will not be focusing on the direct social learning problem (which examines what agents learn), but rather on the dual or reverse learning problem (which examines how agents learned). Specifically, from observations of the stream of beliefs at certain agents, we would like to examine whether it is possible to learn the strength of the connections (influences) from sending components in the network to these receiving agents.