Dear Workshop Community,
Our next meeting will be Wednesday October 2, where Santiago Olivella will present work on
"Dynamic Stochastic Blockmodel Regression for Social Networks: Application to
International Conflicts".
Abstract: Many social scientists theorize how various factors predict the dynamic process
of network evolution. These theories explain the ways in which nodal and dyadic
characteristics play a role in the formation and evolution of relational ties over time.
We develop a dynamic model of social networks by combining a hidden Markov model with a
mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel that identifies latent groups underlying the
network structure. Unlike existing models, we incorporate covariates that predict the
dynamic changes in the node membership of latent groups as well as the direct formation of
edges between dyads. Our motivating application is the dynamic modeling of international
conflicts. While most existing work assumes the decision to engage in militarized conflict
is independent across states and static over time, we demonstrate that conflict patterns
are driven by states’ evolving membership in geopolitical coalitions. Changes in monadic
covariates like democracy shift states between coalitions, generating heterogeneous
effects on conflict over time and across states. The proposed methodology, which relies on
a variational approximation to a collapsed posterior distribution, is implemented through
an open-source software package.
Where: CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354 (see this link
<https://map.harvard.edu/?bld=04471&level=9> for directions).
When: Wednesday, October 2 at 12 noon - 1:30 pm.
All are welcome. Lunch will be provided.
Best,
Georgie
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