Related papers: Statistical Tests for Contagion in Observational S…
Sampling from large networks represents a fundamental challenge for social network research. In this paper, we explore the sensitivity of different sampling techniques (node sampling, edge sampling, random walk sampling, and snowball…
We study proliferation of an action in binary action network coordination games that are generalized to include global effects. This captures important aspects of proliferation of a particular action or narrative in online social networks,…
Typical simulation approaches for evaluating the performance of statistical methods on populations embedded in social networks may fail to capture important features of real-world networks. It can therefore be unclear whether inference…
Network autocorrelation models are widely used to evaluate the impact of social influence on some variable of interest. This is a large class of models that parsimoniously accounts for how one's neighbors influence one's own behaviors or…
Individual-based models of contagious processes are useful for predicting epidemic trajectories and informing intervention strategies. In such models, the incorporation of contact network information can capture the non-randomness and…
The chronic widespread misuse of statistics is usually inadvertent, not intentional. We find cautionary examples in a series of recent papers by Christakis and Fowler that advance statistical arguments for the transmission via social…
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is…
Disease, opinions, ideas, gossip, etc. all spread on social networks. How these networks are connected (the network structure) influences the dynamics of the spreading processes. By investigating these relationships one gains understanding…
When an infection spreads in a community, an individual's probability of becoming infected depends on both her susceptibility and exposure to the contagion through contact with others. While one often has knowledge regarding an individual's…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
Linear regression on network-linked observations has been an essential tool in modeling the relationship between response and covariates with additional network structures. Previous methods either lack inference tools or rely on restrictive…
Increasing evidence suggests that, similar to face-to-face communications, human emotions also spread in online social media. However, the mechanisms underlying this emotion contagion, for example, whether different feelings spread in…
Statistical learning in high-dimensional spaces is challenging without a strong underlying data structure. Recent advances with foundational models suggest that text and image data contain such hidden structures, which help mitigate the…
How social networks influence human behavior has been an interesting topic in applied research. Existing methods often utilized scale-level behavioral data to estimate the influence of a social network on human behavior. This study proposes…
I study peer effects that arise from irreversible decisions in the absence of a standard social equilibrium. I model a latent sequence of decisions in continuous time and obtain a closed-form expression for the likelihood, which allows to…
The importance of peer influence on consumer actions plays a vital role in marketing efforts. However, peer influence effects are often confounded with latent homophily, which are unobserved commonalities that drive friendship.…
Experiments often yield non-identically distributed data for statistical analysis. Tests of hypothesis under such set-ups are generally performed using the likelihood ratio test, which is non-robust with respect to outliers and model…
Research on social contagion dynamics has not yet including a theoretical analysis of the ubiquitous local trend imitation (LTI) characteristic. We propose a social contagion model with a tent-like adoption probability distribution to…
Research on friendship networks in schools suggests that heterogeneity increases homophily preferences. We argue that this may be a misleading interpretation of the coefficients of the exponential random graph models (p*) that are used to…
We consider a model of contagion in financial networks recently introduced in the literature, and we characterize the effect of a few features empirically observed in real networks on the stability of the system. Notably, we consider the…