Related papers: Is Gun Violence Contagious?
I present a novel approach to estimating the temporal and spatial patterns of violent conflict. I show how we can use highly temporally and spatially disaggregated data on conflict events in tandem with Gaussian processes to estimate…
Single-particle traces of the diffusive motion of molecules, cells, or animals are by-now routinely measured, similar to stochastic records of stock prices or weather data. Deciphering the stochastic mechanism behind the recorded dynamics…
This study examines how the fate of a perpetrator in a public mass shooting influences the fate of subsequent perpetrators. Using data from 1966 to 2024, we classify incidents according to whether the perpetrator died at the scene or…
A new discrete-time shot noise Cox process for spatiotemporal data is proposed. The random intensity is driven by a dependent sequence of latent gamma random measures. Some properties of the latent process are derived, such as an…
We study viral transmission in crowds via the short-ranged airborne pathway using a purely model-based approach. Our goal is two-pronged. Firstly, we illustrate with a concrete and pedagogical case study how to estimate the risks of new…
Standard epidemiological models for COVID-19 employ variants of compartment (SIR) models at local scales, implicitly assuming spatially uniform local mixing. Here, we examine the effect of employing more geographically detailed diffusion…
Infectious diseases outbreaks are often characterized by a spatial component induced by hosts' distribution, mobility, and interactions. Spatial models that incorporate hosts' movements are being used to describe these processes, to…
We present a study of sound wave propagation in a time dependent random medium and an application to imaging. The medium is modeled by small temporal and spatial random fluctuations in the wave speed and density, and it moves due to an…
Enduring violent conflicts are interrupted by lulls without violence. Studies of interevent times found power law distributions based on coarse-grained data with a resolution of one day. Fine-grained data of violence with a resolution of…
In the United States, firearm-related deaths and injuries are a major public health issue. Because of limited federal action, state policies are particularly important, and their evaluation informs the actions of other policymakers. The…
The diffusion of information and behaviors over social networks is of considerable interest in research fields ranging from sociology to computer science and application domains such as marketing, finance, human health, and national…
The statistics of Lagrangian pair dispersion in a homogeneous isotropic flow is investigated by means of direct numerical simulations. The focus is on deviations from Richardson eddy-diffusivity model and in particular on the strong…
In the presence of unmeasured spatial confounding, spatial models may actually increase (rather than decrease) bias, leading to uncertainty as to how they should be applied in practice. We evaluated spatial modeling approaches through…
Time plays an essential role in the diffusion of information, influence and disease over networks. In many cases we only observe when a node copies information, makes a decision or becomes infected -- but the connectivity, transmission…
Motivated by the analysis of social networks, we study a model of random networks that has both a given degree distribution and a tunable clustering coefficient. We consider two types of growth processes on these graphs: diffusion and…
The smoothing distribution is the conditional distribution of the diffusion process in the space of trajectories given noisy observations made continuously in time. It is generally difficult to sample from this distribution. We use the…
Stochastic modeling of disease dynamics has had a long tradition. Among the first epidemic models including a spatial structure in the form of local interactions is the contact process. In this article we investigate two extensions of the…
Infectious disease models can be of great use for understanding the underlying mechanisms that influence the spread of diseases and predicting future disease progression. Modeling has been increasingly used to evaluate the potential impact…
In this work, the spread of a contagious disease on a society where the individuals may take precautions is modeled. The primary assumption is that the infected individuals transmit the infection to the susceptible members of the community…
Public safety is vital to every country, especially school safety. In the United States, students and educators are concerned about school shootings. There are critical needs to understand the patterns of school shootings. Without this…