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Show me your friends, and I will tell you whom you vote for: Predicting voting behavior in social networks

Published: 15 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Increasing use of social media in campaigns raises the question of whether one can predict the voting behavior of social-network users who do not disclose their political preferences in their online profiles. Prior work on this task only considered users who generate politically oriented content or voluntarily disclose their political preferences online. We avoid this bias by using a novel Bayesian-network model that combines demographic, behavioral, and social features; we apply this novel approach to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Our model is highly extensible and facilitates the use of incomplete datasets. Furthermore, our work is the first to apply a semi-supervised approach for this task: Using the EM algorithm, we combine labeled survey data with unlabeled Facebook data, thus obtaining larger datasets as well as addressing self-selection bias.

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  1. Show me your friends, and I will tell you whom you vote for: Predicting voting behavior in social networks

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ASONAM '19: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
      August 2019
      1228 pages
      ISBN:9781450368681
      DOI:10.1145/3341161
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 15 January 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. Bayesian networks
      2. U.S. elections
      3. social media

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      • US Office of Naval Research
      • US National Science Foundation
      • William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

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      ASONAM '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 41 of 286 submissions, 14%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 116 of 549 submissions, 21%

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      • (2024)A survey and comparative study on negative sentiment analysis in social media dataMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-024-18452-083:30(75243-75292)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2024
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