Related papers: Identifying Key Influencers using an Egocentric Ne…
In many domains of life, business and management, numerous problems are addressed by small groups of individuals engaged in face-to-face discussions. While research in social psychology has a long history of studying the determinants of…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have long been the gold standard for causal inference across various fields, including business analysis, economic studies, sociology, clinical research, and network learning. The primary advantage of…
The focus of this work is on designing influencing strategies to shape the collective opinion of a network of individuals. We consider a variant of the voter model where opinions evolve in one of two ways. In the absence of external…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the emergence of multi-agent systems where LLMs interact, collaborate, and make decisions in shared environments. While individual model behavior has been extensively studied,…
This paper presents a randomization-based framework for estimating causal effects under interference between units, motivated by challenges that arise in analyzing experiments on social networks. The framework integrates three components:…
Randomized experiments are the gold standard for estimating treatment effects, yet network interference challenges the validity of traditional estimators by violating the stable unit treatment value assumption and introducing bias. While…
Information diffusion and influence maximization are important and extensively studied problems in social networks. Various models and algorithms have been proposed in the literature in the context of the influence maximization problem. A…
Learning about the social structure of hidden and hard-to-reach populations --- such as drug users and sex workers --- is a major goal of epidemiological and public health research on risk behaviors and disease prevention. Respondent-driven…
How would admissions look like in a university program for influencers? In the realm of social network analysis, influence maximization and link prediction stand out as pivotal challenges. Influence maximization focuses on identifying a set…
In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model, called unified model, which naturally unifies the ideas of social influence, collaborative filtering and content-based methods for item recommendation. To address the issue of…
We propose a deterministic compartmental model of infectious disease which considers the test-kits as an important ingredient for the suppression and mitigation of epidemics. A rigorous simulation (with analytical argument) is provided to…
Social network based information campaigns can be used for promoting beneficial health behaviours and mitigating polarisation (e.g. regarding climate change or vaccines). Network-based intervention strategies typically rely on full…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) often suffer from limited inferential efficiency in estimating treatment effects due to their small sample sizes. In recent years, incorporating external controls (ECs) has gained increasing attention as…
Identifying the most influential individuals can provide invaluable help in developing and deploying effective viral marketing strategies. Previous studies mainly focus on designing efficient algorithms or heuristics to find top-K…
Online Social Media (OSM) is a platform through which the users present themselves to the connected world by means of messaging, posting, reacting, tagging, and sharing on different contents with also other social activities. Nowadays, it…
We consider the problem of how to assign treatment in a randomized experiment, in which the correlation among the outcomes is informed by a network available pre-intervention. Working within the potential outcome causal framework, we…
This paper studies treatment effect models in which individuals are classified into unobserved groups based on heterogeneous treatment rules. Using a finite mixture approach, we propose a marginal treatment effect (MTE) framework in which…
In many observational studies in social science and medicine, subjects or units are connected, and one unit's treatment and attributes may affect another's treatment and outcome, violating the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA)…
In settings where interference is present, direct effects are commonly defined as the average effect of a unit's treatment on their own outcome while fixing the treatment status or probability among interfering units, and spillover effects…
The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…