Re: [gov3009-l] Airoldi on "A statistical perspective on complex networks"

Hi all, I hope you can join us at the Applied Statistics Workshop this Wednesday, November 4th, when we will be happy to have Edo Airoldi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics here at Harvard. Edo will be presenting a talk entitled "A statistical perspective on complex networks" for which he has provided the following abstract: Networks are ubiquitous in science and have become a focal point for discussion in everyday life. Formal statistical models for the analysis of network data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of science, as many scientific inquiries involve collections of measurements on pairs of objects. Probability models on graphs date back to 1959. Along with empirical studies in social psychology and sociology from the 1960s, these early works generated an active network community and a substantial literature in the 1970s. This effort moved into the statistical literature in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the past decade has seen a burgeoning network literature in statistical physics and computer science. The growth of the World Wide Web and the emergence of online networking communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and a host of more specialized professional network communities has intensified interest in the study of networks and network data. In this talk, I will review a few ideas that are central to this burgeoning literature. I will emphasize formal model descriptions, and pay special attention to the interpretation of parameters and their estimation. I will conclude by describing open problems and challenges for machine learning and statistics. The workshop will be begin at 12 noon with a light lunch. We usually wrap up around 1:30p. We hope you can make it. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University email: mblackwell(a)iq.harvard.edu url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/