Opinion Group

Abstractly, an opinion group is any group of participants which can be identified as having similar opinions in relation to some or all of the topics in a conversation.

There is no one "right way" to detect opinion groups within a conversation. Many algorithms exist for doing this, and are generally considered clustering algorithms, and groups within the conversation identified with individual clusters.

However, the opinion group is an abstract concept, and need not be the results of an algorithm. They could for instance be defined based on responses to a particular set of hand-selected comments. But the term can also be used much more abstractly, for example, as an abstract reference to hypothetical latent "real world" opinion-types driving participants responses.

For more see:

• opinion groups for additional context around how opinion groups are used in Polis
• clustering algorithms