A Novel Social Influence Model based on
Multiple States and Negative Social Influences
Radhiyatammardhiyyah (1056037), Computer Science and Engineering
Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan
AbstractNowadays, many social networks have
been used by many citizens ranging from children
to adults. Since it gives a significant impact for
them, social influence becomes a hot research
topic and the analytical research about it has been
studied extensively. There are many models to
learn and predict the process of influence
diffusion. This paper proposed a new propagation
model that can improve from the previous
method. Also, this work provides five states to
represent the multiple states of influences where
the impact of social influences will be reduced.
KeywordsSocial Influence analysis, Multiple
States, Social Network Influence, Negative social
Influences, Social Persuasion
I. INTRODUCTION
T he using of social media has been increasing
recently. The users come from different ages to
use various social media. They used the following
social websites and application such as Instagram,
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Because of this
issue, many researchers tried to analyze the effect
of this kind of habit. Because social influence plays
important role among citizens. Everything can be
affected and changed through this social network
such as habits, emotions and even beliefs. For
Instance, by following the popular actors or
celebrity, users always follow up the information
regarding them. The news about them were always
shown on the news post because of his/her outward
appearance. This situation will affect users in some
cases. Apart from those, we believe what our expert
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said in their respective fields, this also can
influence them at the same time.
In analyzing the influence of social
network, there are three highly representative
models. They are Linear Threshold (LT) Model,
Independent Cascade (IC) Model and Heat
Diffusion (HD) Model. All those models classify
nodes into active and inactive states. Active node:
This node has been inuenced, and has the power
to inuence others. Inactive node: This node has
not received enough inuence to become an active
node, and thus has no power to inuence other [1].
Each node has different level of influence and only
the active nodes can give the influence to inactive
nodes. Those previous models face two problems.
The first is they only contemplate the positive
influence possibilities. The second is the nodes that
have become active cannot return to the inactive
nodes.
To solve those problems, this paper will
present a Multi-State Open Opinion Model (MOO
Model). It aims to stimulate several opinions which
are held by users in the real world not in social
media. Moreover, this paper organizes the positive
opinions into a Positive and Active (PA) state and
a Positive and Inactive (PI) state. Also, this work
categorizes negative opinions into a Negative and
Active (NA) state and a Negative and Inactive (NI)
state. Above and beyond positive and negative
states, there is also a Neutral (N) state which
represents the users with no specic opinion.
The rest of paper is organized as follows:
Section II discuss the related works. Section III
introduces the proposed method by which to
propagate influence in MOO model. We propose
the experimental results in Section IV and the last
is Section V which concludes the paper.
 Fig 1. Propagation of influence in LT model and IC model.
II. RELATED WORK
In this section, there are three models
mentioned that will be discussed; Linear Threshold
(LT) Model, Independent Cascade (IC) Model and
Heat Diffusion (HD) Model and their inuence
propagation methods as well in order to provide
deep insights. For the first example of LT model is
shown in the upper part of Fig. 1. It is assumed that
only node A is active and the other nodes are
inactive. To illustrate the figure, node A begins to
propagate inuence to nodes B and C through
edges, nodes B and C will get the inuence power
from node A as characterized by the blue
histograms. If a node receives a certain level of
inuence greater than its personal threshold, the
node will be inuenced successfully, such as node
C in the step 1. In step 2, node C becomes active
and starts to propagate its inuence to node B, D,
E, and F. With the inuence power from node A
and C, node B becomes active too. In the last step,
nodes A, B, C, and F are active while node D and
E, receiving inuence power less than the
thresholds, remain inactive. For the second
III. THE PROPOSED METHOD
This section explains about the proposed
method that will be used to define the attributes of
MOO model.
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example is IC model which is described in the Fig.
1(c). it shows that each node affects neighbors
through inuential probability on the edge. In this
part, node C inuences node B and F
successfully. Node B becomes active because of C
but not A since the inuence is self-determining
between the two nodes.
Based on the previous work, Chen [2] projected
an independent cascade model with negative
opinions, IC-N, which extends IC model. They
conclude an effective activation to two cases of
activation, positive activation and negative
activation. Finally, HD model characterizes
inuences by heat features. Fig. 1(d) is an example
of HD model. In this figure, if we adopt the active
threshold is 3, node V1, V2, and V3 are active
nodes at the rst timestamp. The heat values of V1,
V2, and V3 are reduced since they share their heat
values to other nodes. V4 and V5 receive the heat
values from their active neighbors V3 so that the
heat values of V4 and V5 increase. Therefore, V1,
V3, V4 and V5 are active nodes after 10 iterations.
HD model also has some boundaries when negative
inuences try to be presented by heat resulting the
heat value is sharply decreased.
A. Multi-state Open Opinion Model
There are two defined categories for social
networks; a weighted and directed graph. Those
nodes have corresponded to all user media users.
Also, the engaged graph between two users can
direct to shows the connections for the target users.
To know further, following are some definitions The Diffusion Matrix (DM) above is as the
used in this model represent of the influence propagation. The
inuence propagation process can thus be
1. Opinion States (OS) formulated as the follow equation.
OS =[os1, os2, ..., osn], where osi is the opinion state
which is supported by user i. With respect to a where t is the current timestamp corresponding to
product or an event, people can have different kinds the current iteration, and t0 is the beginning time
of opinions. We categorize these diverse opinions at time zero. OV t is the normalized form of OVt,
into several opinion states. In this definition, there where ovi is from 0 to 1.
are five states;
Positive and Active (PA): Users hold positive
opinions and are willing to inuence others. C. Example of Multi-State Open Model
Positive and Inactive (PI): Users hold positive
opinions but do not inuence others
Neutral (N): Users without adequate opinion, and
thus do not inuence other users.
Negative and Inactive (NI): Users have negative
opinions but do not inuence others.
Negative and Active (NA): Users have negative
opinions and try to inuence other users.

2. Opinion V alue (OV)

OV=[ov1, ov2, ..., ovn], where ovi is the opinion
value of user i. An opinion can be quantied as a
value.

3. State Transition Table (STT)

The opinion value is mapped to opinion states
using a state transition table, which contains four
thresholds. STTi=[ PAi PIi NIi NAi].
B. Influence Propagation
This part will describe a design of propagation
method in estimating the opinion values of social
media users and the updating of their current states
as well.
Fig 2. Initial network and state threshold table
The Fig 2 above is an example for MOO
model. To illustrate, there are four people as
variable V for each person. Every person adopts the
same state transition table on the right for
simplicity.
Besides, the fig 3 below describes the
alteration of OV and states from timestamp 0 to
stable timestamp 13. Until timestamp 4, OV4=
[1.00 0.96 0.53 0.39]T, and V4 receive enough
inuence to exceed the NI.

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 Fig 3. The Changing of opinion value and related states

kind of event. The upper-left pie chart illustrates

IV. EXPERIMENTS
This Part introduces the preliminary finding
which is the dataset.,
A. The Preliminary Finding
This work used the dataset from eight events
from Facebook websites including musical
performances, movies, public issues and even daily
necessities. Before quantifying the STT from the
result of survey, a social influence website had
been built on Facebook.
All events mentioned above contain some
selections with corresponding meanings with
respect to PA, PI, N, NI and NA. This work gives
the corresponding opinion values and opinion
states to each user depend on users selections. In
addition, this work assumes the opinion value of
PA is 0.75, PI is 0.25, N is 0, NI is -0.25, and NA
is 0.75. The user not only can share and their
opinions and comments with all their friends after
finishing the survey but also, they are allowed to
change their opinions as well after knowing their
friends opinion. The website investigated the
changes of these events in the period from May,
2014 to June, 2014.
that 62% of people hold positive opinions for
positive events. Additionally, there are 20% of
users taking neutral opinions and 18% of users
having opposite feelings about these events.
As mentioned before, the data was collected
from the initial opinion states. Since then, this work
observes the inuence propagation and the change
of states from users on the website used. On the
other hand, MOO model gains the initial opinion
values and predicts the nal opinion states with a
decay rate =0 .1 and relates with the correct nal
opinion states observed on the website used. The
precision measure is defined as:
where:
n is the number of nodes,
nc is the number of nodes whose opinions states are
predicted correctly.
n, nc, and precision of each state of each kind of
event are shown in the bottom half of Fig. 4.
Overall, the average precision value is 60.6%,
including positive, negative and neutral events.

B. Prediction Result Using MOO Model

Eight events have conducted in this paper. They
are divided into several parts. They are four
positive events, three negative events and one
neutral event.

Fig. 4 below is shown for the network

topology. In this figure, the upper half indicates the
average distribution of users initial states in each

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 REFERENCES

[1] Huang. Jen-Wei, Ma, Hao-Shang, Chen,

Yuan-Chang. Multi-state Open Opinion Model
based on Positive and Negative Social Influences.
2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on
Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining

[2] W. Chen, A. Collins, R. Cummings, T. Ke, Z.

Liu, D. Rincon, X. Sun, Y. Wang, W. Wei, and Y.
Yuan. Inuence maximization in social networks
when negative opinions may emerge and
propagate. In SIAM International Conference on
Data Mining, pages 379390, 2011.

Fig 4. The network Topology

V. CONCLUSION
This paper proposed a new social network
influence model. The used method is based on
multiple state and negative influences. Regarding
the previous method, three related works; Linear
Threshold (LT) Model, Independent Cascade (IC)
Model and Heat Diffusion (HD) Model only
consider positive influence and only two states for
each user. It becomes the cons of those works
because there is no chance to return to inactive
states especially when some nodes are influenced
as active nodes.
After applying the proposed method (MOO
model), those limitations have been broken. MOO
model has five opinion states and by having this,
this model gives permissions for users to adjust
these states using state transition table. Moreover,
the function of diffusion matrix applied in this
paper shows the successful in predicting the
influence diffusion even after some iterations.
To conclude, this work has successfully applied
a social influence website in order to observe the
state transition habit. Those divided in three types
events; positive, negative and neutral.