A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records.
Inspired by the increasing attention of the scientific community towards the understanding of human relationships and actions in social sciences, in this paper we address the problem of inferring from voting data the hidden influence on individuals from competing ideology groups. As a case study, we...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2020-01-01
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| Series: | PLoS ONE |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238481 |
| _version_ | 1819016303994732544 |
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| author | Corrado Possieri Chiara Ravazzi Fabrizio Dabbene Giuseppe C Calafiore |
| author_facet | Corrado Possieri Chiara Ravazzi Fabrizio Dabbene Giuseppe C Calafiore |
| author_sort | Corrado Possieri |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Inspired by the increasing attention of the scientific community towards the understanding of human relationships and actions in social sciences, in this paper we address the problem of inferring from voting data the hidden influence on individuals from competing ideology groups. As a case study, we present an analysis of the closeness of members of the Italian Senate to political parties during the XVII Legislature. The proposed approach is aimed at automatic extraction of the relevant information by disentangling the actual influences from noise, via a two step procedure. First, a sparse principal component projection is performed on the standardized voting data. Then, the projected data is combined with a generative mixture model, and an information theoretic measure, which we refer to as Political Data-aNalytic Affinity (Political DNA), is finally derived. We show that the definition of this new affinity measure, together with suitable visualization tools for displaying the results of analysis, allows a better understanding and interpretability of the relationships among political groups. |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-21T02:45:30Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-051cff3466514183952c5d6d22a7d01c |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1932-6203 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-21T02:45:30Z |
| publishDate | 2020-01-01 |
| publisher | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
| record_format | Article |
| series | PLoS ONE |
| spelling | doaj.art-051cff3466514183952c5d6d22a7d01c2022-12-21T19:18:34ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032020-01-01159e023848110.1371/journal.pone.0238481A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records.Corrado PossieriChiara RavazziFabrizio DabbeneGiuseppe C CalafioreInspired by the increasing attention of the scientific community towards the understanding of human relationships and actions in social sciences, in this paper we address the problem of inferring from voting data the hidden influence on individuals from competing ideology groups. As a case study, we present an analysis of the closeness of members of the Italian Senate to political parties during the XVII Legislature. The proposed approach is aimed at automatic extraction of the relevant information by disentangling the actual influences from noise, via a two step procedure. First, a sparse principal component projection is performed on the standardized voting data. Then, the projected data is combined with a generative mixture model, and an information theoretic measure, which we refer to as Political Data-aNalytic Affinity (Political DNA), is finally derived. We show that the definition of this new affinity measure, together with suitable visualization tools for displaying the results of analysis, allows a better understanding and interpretability of the relationships among political groups.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238481 |
| spellingShingle | Corrado Possieri Chiara Ravazzi Fabrizio Dabbene Giuseppe C Calafiore A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records. PLoS ONE |
| title | A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records. |
| title_full | A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records. |
| title_fullStr | A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records. |
| title_full_unstemmed | A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records. |
| title_short | A new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records. |
| title_sort | new metric for understanding hidden political influences from voting records |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238481 |
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