Max-Plus Opinion Dynamics With Temporal Confidence

Abstract: Often in the setting of human-based interactions, the existence of a temporal hierarchy of information plays an important role in diffusion and opinion dynamics within communities. For example at the individual agent level, more recently acquired information may exert greater influence during decision-making processes. To facilitate further exploration of this effect, we introduce an efficient method for modelling temporally asynchronous opinion updates, where the timing of updates depends on the timing of incoming opinion states received from neighbours. The framework enables the introduction of information arrival-time lag by means of lag-vectors. These are used to weight the relevance of information received by agents, based on the delay between its receipt and the subsequent opinion update. The temporal dynamics (i.e. the times at which information is transmitted) are governed by an underlying algebraic structure called max-plus algebra. We investigate the resulting continuous opinion dynamics under the max-plus regime using a modified Hegselmann-Krause model, replacing the conventional confidence-interval based on the distance between opinions with one based instead on the recency of information received by agents.