Related papers: A Bayesian Approach to Estimate Causal Peer Influe…
Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, i.e., with a node's network partners being informative about the node's…
We address the problem of using observational data to estimate peer contagion effects, the influence of treatments applied to individuals in a network on the outcomes of their neighbors. A main challenge to such estimation is that homophily…
We investigate peer role model influence on successful graduation from Therapeutic Communities (TCs) for substance abuse and criminal behavior. We use data from 3 TCs that kept records of exchanges of affirmations among residents and their…
Scientists have been interested in estimating causal peer effects to understand how people's behaviors are affected by their network peers. However, it is well known that identification and estimation of causal peer effects are challenging…
Causal inference in networks should account for interference, which occurs when a unit's outcome is influenced by treatments or outcomes of peers. Heterogeneous peer influence (HPI) occurs when a unit's outcome is influenced differently by…
The Linear Threshold Model is a widely used model that describes how information diffuses through a social network. According to this model, an individual adopts an idea or product after the proportion of their neighbors who have adopted it…
A prominent threat to causal inference about peer effects over social networks is the presence of homophily bias, that is, social influence between friends and families is entangled with common characteristics or underlying similarities…
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.…
Contagion effect refers to the causal effect of peers' behavior on the outcome of an individual in social networks. Contagion can be confounded due to latent homophily which makes contagion effect estimation very hard: nodes in a homophilic…
Estimating causal effects is crucial for decision-makers in many applications, but it is particularly challenging with observational network data due to peer interactions. Many algorithms have been proposed to estimate causal effects…
Peer grading is an educational system in which students assess each other's work. It is commonly applied under Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and offline classroom settings. With this system, instructors receive a reduced grading…
Causal inference on populations embedded in social networks poses technical challenges, since the typical no interference assumption frequently does not hold. Existing methods developed in the context of network interference rely upon the…
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…
Homophily and social influence are two key concepts of social network analysis. Distinguishing between these phenomena is difficult, and approaches to disambiguate the two have been primarily limited to longitudinal data analyses. In this…
Unveiling individuals' preferences for connecting with similar others (choice homophily) beyond the structural factors determining the pool of opportunities, is a challenging task. Here, we introduce a robust methodology for quantifying and…
This paper develops a method to conduct causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounders by leveraging networks with homophily, a frequently observed tendency to form edges with similar nodes. I introduce a concept of asymptotic…
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…
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…
In social science researches, causal inference regarding peer effects often faces significant challenges due to homophily bias and contextual confounding. For example, unmeasured health conditions (e.g., influenza) and psychological states…
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…