Related papers: Hidden population size estimation from respondent-…
Objective: Lack of representative data about hidden groups, like men who have sex with men (MSM), hinders an evidence-based response to the HIV epidemics. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) was developed to overcome sampling challenges in…
We develop methods for estimating the size of hard-to-reach populations from data collected using network-based questions on standard surveys. Such data arise by asking respondents how many people they know in a specific group (e.g., people…
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a procedure to sample from hard-to-reach populations. It has been widely used in several countries, especially in the monitoring of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. Hard-to-reach…
Respondent-Driven Sampling is a method to sample hard-to-reach human populations by link-tracing over their social networks. Beginning with a convenience sample, each person sampled is given a small number of uniquely identified coupons to…
Estimating the size of hard-to-reach populations is an important problem for many fields. The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) is a relatively new approach to estimate the size of these hard-to-reach populations by asking respondents the…
People who inject drugs are an important population to study in order to reduce transmission of blood-borne illnesses including HIV and Hepatitis. In this paper we estimate the HIV and Hepatitis C prevalence among people who inject drugs,…
We present a new design and inference method for estimating population size of a hidden population best reached through a link-tracing design. The strategy involves the Rao-Blackwell Theorem applied to a sufficient statistic markedly…
Populations of interest are often hidden from data for a variety of reasons, though their magnitude remains important in determining resource allocation and appropriate policy. One popular approach to population size estimation, the…
The network scale-up method (NSUM) is a survey-based method for estimating the number of individuals in a hidden or hard-to-reach subgroup of a general population. In NSUM surveys, sampled individuals report how many others they know in the…
Capture-recapture methods aim to estimate the size of a closed population on the basis of multiple incomplete enumerations of individuals. In many applications, the individual probability of being recorded is heterogeneous in the…
In this paper, we consider capture-recapture experiments with heterogenous catchability. In the setting we consider, the widespread Huggins-Alho estimator is not very suitable and we introduce and study a new generalized Horvitz-Thompson…
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 Network scale-up method is commonly used to overcome difficulties in estimating the size of hard-to-reach populations. The method uses indirect information based on social network of each participant taken from the general population,…
The sampling frame in most social science surveys excludes members of certain groups, known as hard-to-reach groups. These groups, or subpopulations, may be difficult to access (the homeless, e.g.), camouflaged by stigma (individuals with…
Motivated by various applications, we consider the problem of homogeneous human population size (N) estimation from Dual-record system (DRS) (equivalently, two-sample capture-recapture experiment). The likelihood estimate from the…
This paper considers the Target Set Selection (TSS) Problem in social networks, a fundamental problem in viral marketing. In the TSS problem, a graph and a threshold value for each vertex of the graph are given. We need to find a minimum…
This paper explores bias in the estimation of sampling variance in Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS). Prior methodological work on RDS has focused on its problematic assumptions and the biases and inefficiencies of its estimators of the…
Most real-world networks are too large to be measured or studied directly and there is substantial interest in estimating global network properties from smaller sub-samples. One of the most important global properties is the number of…
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,…
A new strategy is introduced for estimating population size and networked population characteristics. Sample selection is based on a multi-wave snowball sampling design. A generalized stochastic block model is posited for the population's…