Talk by Mary Thompson (DSAS colloquium)
Room: 248
Title: Explorations in Social Networks
Abstract: A social network is a collection of individuals who potentially have links to each other. The study of social networks is an interdisciplinary field that crosses social psychology, sociology, computer science, statistics and mathematics. The talk will give an overview of some research on sampling from social networks, the spread of communicable disease on networks, and the design of intervention or treatment regimes for networks.
While medical treatments are usually administered to the individual for whom the outcome is defined, it is natural with preventive health or behavioural interventions to take social network structure into account. The evaluation of these latter types of treatment regimes would look to optimizing the expected outcomes for the network, subject to cost or feasibility constraints. We consider how to use network data to estimate the models needed for the design.