This week in math club graduate student Isabelle Beaudry will discuss inference with social network data with applications in public health. We meet 5 – 6pm Wednesday, February 24th in LGRT 1528. Pizza and soda will be provided.
Isabelle’s abstract
Estimating disease prevalence among human populations is crucial for public health surveillance. In some settings however, we don’t have a list of individuals in the population of interest. In this talk, I will discuss a sampling technique which alleviates this problem by using social networks. I will therefore introduce some mathematical representation of social networks, follow with a description of Markov chains on the network nodes and finish with a brief introduction to prevalence estimation.