The Internet has already become a medium for people to access information, express their views, and connect with one another through various media and tools as a result of its rapid global development. Web 2.0 has become increasingly important in people’s daily lives. With the passing of time, many online communities, such as blogs, forums, and websites, are becoming more interactive. Individuals can easily express their opinions publicly and see what others say about their opinions. In a social network, an opinion leader is a powerful individual who is an expert in a particular field and has a large number of people who follow his or her comments or ideas. Companies and governments may contact the most powerful people after discovering them in order to influence sales or guide public opinion, respectively. In heterogeneous communication networks, opinion leaders serve as an influencer for the acceptance and dissemination of new products and users in marketing. Others’ drives, values, perceptions, motivations, and actions can be influenced by opinion leaders. These influences have a major effect on other customers’ policymaking processes. Opinion leaders come in a variety of demographic shapes; in general, they are committed, ambitious, and dynamic individuals with excellent academic and social edifications who persuade customers through their expert knowledge. Opinions and values are the most important variables in human experiences in social phenomena. The method of assessing opinions is extremely difficult since people often change their minds when speaking with others. The study of the evolution and formation of opinions in a social group is known as opinion dynamics, and it is based on collective decision-making. The bounded confidence rule is one of the intrinsic interaction principles in the dynamics of human actions. Many models have been created to date to explore the dynamics of leaders’ decision-making. Due to the social network’s high complexity and the randomness and contingency of their behavior, identifying opinion leaders in the network is difficult. Organizations and entrepreneurs must choose which opinion leaders to partner with to gain a deeper understanding of how to communicate with them to promote various goods and services. For the opinion leader’s selection optimization, the proposed framework feature-based opinion leader selection is utilized using the ant colony optimization technique that selects the best opinion leader based on their unique features. The proposed method will address the opinion leader selection problem.
Criterial Based Opinion Leader’s Selection for Decision-Making Using Ant Colony Optimization