Network Construction for Sampled Ego-Centric Data

• Activity Number: 668
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 8, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Ravi Goyal*+ and Victor DeGruttola and Joseph Blitzstein
• Companies: Harvard University and Harvard University and Harvard University
• Keywords: network data ; sampled data ; network generation

Abstract

We present a framework to construct networks using sampled data collected from ego-centric surveys. The constructed networks not only target mean estimates of local network properties (e.g. density, degree distributions, and mixing frequencies) but also incorporate the uncertainty due to sampling. We will utilize this framework in two applications. The first is designing a large cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) to evaluate the effectiveness of HIV prevention strategies in reducing HIV incidence in Botswana. The second is combining epidemic data and sexual histories to understand transmission networks.