MacMillan-CSAP Workshop on Quantitative Research Methods: Mark S. Handcock, “Exponential-family Approaches to Jointly Model Network Relations and Endogenous Attributes”

Event time: 
Thursday, February 19, 2015 - 5:00pm through 6:15pm
Event description: 

“Exponential-family Approaches to Jointly Model Network Relations and Endogenous Attributes”

Joint work with Ian E. Fellows.  See background paper.

Speaker: Mark S. Handcock, Professor of Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Abstract: Random graphs, where the connections between nodes are considered random variables, have wide applicability in the social sciences. Exponential-family Random Graph Models (ERGM) have shown themselves to be a useful class of models for representing complex social phenomena. We generalize ERGM by also modeling the attributes of the social actors as random variates, thus creating a random model of both the relational and individual data, which we call Exponential-family Random Network Models (ERNM). This provides a framework for expanded analysis of network processes, including a new formulation for network regression where the outcomes, covariates and relations are socially endogenous. The framework also sheds light on the degeneracy issues of exponential-family models for complex phenomena. In this talk, we focus on a new class of latent cluster models and network regression.

Guest Speaker Bio: Mark S. Handcock is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at the University of California – Los Angeles. His research involves methodological development, and is based largely on motivation from questions in the social sciences. Recent work focuses on the development of statistical methodology for the collection and analysis of social network data, surveying of hard-to-reach populations, combining population-level and individual-level survey information, spatial processes and demography.

This workshop series is being sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.

Event type 
Workshop