A Unified View on Neural Message Passing with Opinion Dynamics for Social Networks

Social networks represent a common form of interconnected data frequently depicted as graphs within the domain of deep learning-based inference. These communities inherently form dynamic systems, achieving stability through continuous internal communications and opinion exchanges among social actors along their social ties. In contrast, neural message passing in deep learning provides a clear and intuitive mathematical framework for understanding information propagation and aggregation among connected nodes in graphs. Node representations are dynamically updated by considering both the connectivity and status of neighboring nodes. This research harmonizes concepts from sociometry and neural message passing to analyze and infer the behavior of dynamic systems. Drawing inspiration from opinion dynamics in sociology, we propose ODNet, a novel message passing scheme incorporating bounded confidence, to refine the influence weight of local nodes for message propagation. We adjust the similarity cutoffs of bounded confidence and influence weights of ODNet and define opinion exchange rules that align with the characteristics of social network graphs. We show that ODNet enhances prediction performance across various graph types and alleviates oversmoothing issues. Furthermore, our approach surpasses conventional baselines in graph representation learning and proves its practical significance in analyzing real-world co-occurrence networks of metabolic genes. Remarkably, our method simplifies complex social network graphs solely by leveraging knowledge of interaction frequencies among entities within the system. It accurately identifies internal communities and the roles of genes in different metabolic pathways, including opinion leaders, bridge communicators, and isolators.