Related papers: Statistical Tests for Contagion in Observational S…

Individual decisions and behaviors are shaped not only by direct interactions with others but also by the collective emotional dynamics within groups. In this work, we introduce the signed simplicial contagion model, integrating both…

We present a computational approach for estimating emotion contagion on social media networks. Built on a foundation of psychology literature, our approach estimates the degree to which the perceivers' emotional states (positive or…

This paper considers a problem of distributed hypothesis testing and social learning. Individual nodes in a network receive noisy local (private) observations whose distribution is parameterized by a discrete parameter (hypotheses). The…

We consider a two-sample hypothesis testing problem, where the distributions are defined on the space of undirected graphs, and one has access to only one observation from each model. A motivating example for this problem is comparing the…

Current methods for the detection of contagious outbreaks give contemporaneous information about the course of an epidemic at best. Individuals at the center of a social network are likely to be infected sooner, on average, than those at…

Although social and biomedical scientists have long been interested in the process through which ideas and behaviors diffuse, the identification of causal diffusion effects, also known as peer and contagion effects, remains challenging.…

The spread of socially-learnt behaviours occurs in many animal species, and understanding how behaviours spread can provide novel insights into the causes and consequences of sociality. Within wild populations, behaviour spread is often…

This paper develops a framework for identification, estimation, and inference on the causal mechanisms driving endogenous social network formation. Identification is challenging because of unobserved confounders and reverse causality;…

Network analysis is often focused on characterizing the dependencies between network relations and node-level attributes. Potential relationships are typically explored by modeling the network as a function of the nodal attributes or by…

We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…

Social networks affect the diffusion of information, and thus have the potential to reduce or amplify inequality in access to opportunity. We show empirically that social networks often exhibit a much larger potential for unequal diffusion…

Homophily, the tendency of individuals to connect with others who share similar attributes, is a defining feature of social networks. Understanding how groups interact, both within and across, is crucial for uncovering the dynamics of…

Longitudinal social network studies can easily suffer from insufficient statistical power. Studies that simultaneously investigate change of network ties and change of nodal attributes (selection and influence studies) are particularly at…

The symptoms of many infectious diseases influence their host to withdraw from social activity limiting their own potential to spread. Successful transmission therefore requires the onset of infectiousness to coincide with a time when its…

Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of…

Homophily can put minority groups at a disadvantage by restricting their ability to establish links with people from a majority group. This can limit the overall visibility of minorities in the network. Building on a Barab\'{a}si-Albert…

Mastering the dynamics of social influence requires separating, in a database of information propagation traces, the genuine causal processes from temporal correlation, i.e., homophily and other spurious causes. However, most studies to…

We examine how three different communication processes operating through social networks are affected by homophily -- the tendency of individuals to associate with others similar to themselves. Homophily has no effect if messages are…

Randomized experiments, or "A/B" tests, remain the gold standard for evaluating the causal effect of a policy intervention or product change. However, experimental settings, such as social networks, where users are interacting and…

Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is…