Related papers: The graphical structure of respondent-driven sampl…
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) collects a sample of individuals in a networked population by incentivizing the sampled individuals to refer their contacts into the sample. This iterative process is initialized from some seed node(s).…
The discovery of the "hidden population", whose size and membership are unknown, is made possible by assuming that its members are connected in a social network by their relationships. We explore these groups by a chain-referral sampling…
Respondent-driven sampling is a widely-used network sampling technique, designed to sample from hard-to-reach populations. Estimation from the resulting samples is an area of active research, with software available to compute at least four…
In real-world and online social networks, individuals receive and transmit information in real time. Cascading information transmissions (e.g. phone calls, text messages, social media posts) may be understood as a realization of a diffusion…
Web crawling, snowball sampling, and respondent-driven sampling (RDS) are three types of network sampling techniques used to contact individuals in hard-to-reach populations. This paper studies these procedures as a Markov process on the…
Rejection sampling is a technique for sampling from difficult distributions. However, its use is limited due to a high rejection rate. Common adaptive rejection sampling methods either work only for very specific distributions or without…
Some of the most used sampling mechanisms that implicitly leverage a social network depend on tuning parameters; for instance, Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is specified by the number of seeds and maximum number of referrals. We are…
We study the exploration of an Erd\"os-R\'enyi random graph by a respondent-driven sampling method, where discovered vertices reveal their neighbours. Some of them receive coupons to reveal in their turn their own neighbourhood. This leads…
This article presents a novel approach for learning low-dimensional distributed representations of users in online social networks. Existing methods rely on the network structure formed by the social relationships among users to extract…
Awerbuch et al.'s approach to distributed recommender systems (DRSs) is to have agents sample products at random while randomly querying one another for the best item they have found; we improve upon this by adding a communication network.…
Ranked set sampling (RSS) is a stratified sampling method that improves efficiency over simple random sampling (SRS) by utilizing auxiliary information for ranking and stratification. While balanced RSS (BRSS) assumes equal allocation…
The uniqueness of online social networks makes it possible to implement new methods that increase the quality and effectiveness of research processes. While surveys are one of the most important tools for research, the representativeness of…
Population size estimates for hidden and hard-to-reach populations are particularly important when members are known to suffer from disproportion health issues or to pose health risks to the larger ambient population in which they are…
This thesis presents Regenerative Rejection Sampling (RRS), a novel approximate sampling algorithm inspired by classical Rejection Sampling and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The method constructs a continuous-time regenerative process…
Pedestrian trajectory prediction is a challenging task because of the complexity of real-world human social behaviors and uncertainty of the future motion. For the first issue, existing methods adopt fully connected topology for modeling…
The diffusion phenomenon has a remarkable impact on Online Social Networks (OSNs). Gathering diffusion data over these large networks encounters many challenges which can be alleviated by adopting a suitable sampling approach. The…
Most of the real world complex networks such as the Internet, World Wide Web and collaboration networks are huge; and to infer their structure and dynamics one requires handling large connectivity (adjacency) matrices. Also, to find out the…
Statistical pattern classification methods based on data-random graphs were introduced recently. In this approach, a random directed graph is constructed from the data using the relative positions of the data points from various classes.…
In this paper, a new modification of ranked set sampling (RSS) is suggested, namely; unified ranked set sampling (URSS) for estimating the population mean and variance. The performance of the empirical mean and variance estimators based on…
Network surveys of key populations at risk for HIV are an essential part of the effort to understand how the epidemic spreads and how it can be prevented. Estimation of population values from the sample data has been probematical, however,…