Bottcher, L., Montealegre, P., Goles, E., & Gersbach, H. (2020). Competing activists-Political polarization. Physica A, 545, 13 pp.
Abstract: Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not fully understood. Since interactions between influential actors ("activists'') and voters play a major role in opinion formation, e.g. through social media, we develop a macroscopic opinion model in which competing activists spread their political ideas in specific groups of society. These ideas spread further to other groups in declining strength. While unilateral spreading shifts the opinion distribution, competition of activists leads to additional phenomena: Small heterogeneities among competing activists cause them to target different groups in society, which amplifies polarization. For moderate heterogeneities, we obtain target cycles and further amplification of polarization. In such cycles, the stronger activist differentiates himself from the weaker one, while the latter aims to imitate the stronger activist. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Fierro, R., Leiva, V., & Balakrishnan, N. (2015). Statistical Inference on a Stochastic Epidemic Model. Commun. Stat.-Simul. Comput., 44(9), 2297–2314.
Abstract: In this work, we develop statistical inference for the parameters of a discrete-time stochastic SIR epidemic model. We use a Markov chain for describing the dynamic behavior of the epidemic. Specifically, we propose estimators for the contact and removal rates based on the maximum likelihood and martingale methods, and establish their asymptotic distributions. The obtained results are applied in the statistical analysis of the basic reproduction number, a quantity that is useful in establishing vaccination policies. In order to evaluate the population size for which the results are useful, a numerical study is carried out. Finally, a comparison of the maximum likelihood and martingale estimators is conducted by means of Monte Carlo simulations.
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