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Obesity is currently affecting very large portions of the global population. Effective prevention and treatment starts at the early age and requires objective knowledge of population-level behavior on the region/neighborhood scale. To this…

People in the Internet era have to cope with the information overload, striving to find what they are interested in, and usually face this situation by following a limited number of sources or friends that best match their interests. A…

Relapse, the recurrence of a disorder following a symptomatic remission, is a frequent outcome in substance abuse disorders. Some of our prior results suggested that relapse, in the context of abusive drinking, is likely an "unbeatable"…

Much research has been conducted on how consumption is related to human relations, for example, consumer communities organized around specific brands, or the way people use products to define their own identity and transmit a desired image.…

Current demographic trends in the UK include a fast-growing elderly population and dropping birth rates, and demand for social care amongst the aged is rising. The UK depends on informal social care -- family members or friends providing…

Many societies are organized in networks that are formed by people who meet and interact over time. In this paper, we present a first model to capture the micro-foundations of social networks evolution, where boundedly rational agents of…

We describe semiparametric estimation and inference for causal effects using observational data from a single social network. Our asymptotic results are the first to allow for dependence of each observation on a growing number of other…

People's perceptions about the size of minority groups in social networks can be biased, often showing systematic over- or underestimation. These social perception biases are often attributed to biased cognitive or motivational processes.…

According to prior work, the type of relationship between the person consuming alcohol and others in the surrounding (friends, family, spouse, etc.), and the number of those people (alone, with one person, with a group, etc.) are related to…

The rise and fall of online social networks recently generated an enormous amount of interest among people, both inside and outside of academia. Gillette [Businessweek magazine, 2011] did a detailed analysis of MySpace, which started losing…

Now that so much of collective action takes place online, web-generated data can further understanding of the mechanics of Internet-based mobilisation. This trace data offers social science researchers the potential for new forms of…

Nearly all previous work on geo-locating latent states and activities from social media confounds general discussions about activities, self-reports of users participating in those activities at times in the past or future, and self-reports…

The practice of marriage is an understudied phenomenon in behavioural sciences despite being ubiquitous across human cultures. This modelling paper shows that replacing distant direct kin with in-laws increases the interconnectedness of the…

Threshold models of global cascades have been extensively used to model real-world collective behavior, such as the contagious spread of fads and the adoption of new technologies. A common property of those cascade models is that a…

Obesity is a complex disease and its prevalence depends on multiple factors related to the local socioeconomic, cultural and urban context of individuals. Many obesity prevention strategies and policies, however, are horizontal measures…

Social groups are fundamental elements of any social system. Their emergence and evolution are closely related to the structure and dynamics of a social system. Research on social groups was primarily focused on the growth and the structure…

Uncovering the hidden regularities and organizational principles of networks arising in physical systems ranging from the molecular level to the scale of large communication infrastructures is the key issue for the understanding of their…

In the last decade, social media has evolved as one of the leading platform to create, share, or exchange information; it is commonly used as a way for individuals to maintain social connections. In this online digital world, people use to…

Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into…

Modeling human dynamics responsible for the formation and evolution of the so-called social networks - structures comprised of individuals or organizations and indicating connectivities existing in a community - is a topic recently…