Network models are widely used to represent relations among interacting units or actors. Network data often exhibit transitivity, meaning that two actors that have ties to a third actor are more likely to be tied than actors that do not, homophily by …
Network data arise in a wide variety of applications. Although descriptive statistics for networks abound in the literature, the science of fitting statistical models to complex network data is still in its infancy. The models considered in this …
Sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) constitute a major public health concern. Mathematical models for the transmission dynamics of STDs indicate that heterogeneity in sexual activity level allow them to persist even when the typical behavior of the …
We present a systematic examination of real network datasets using maximum likelihood estimation for exponential random graph models as well as new procedures to evaluate how well the models fit the observed graphs. These procedures compare …
The most promising class of statistical models for expressing structural properties of social networks is the class of Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs), also known as $p^*$ models. The strong point of these models is that they can represent …
Recent advances in latent space and related random effects models hold much promise for representing network data. The inherent dependency between ties in a network makes modeling data of this type difficult. In this article we consider a recently …
This paper presents recent advances in the statistical modeling of random graphs that have an impact on the empirical study of social networks. Statistical exponential family models (Wasserman and Pattison 1996) are a generalization of the Markov …
Distributions of the number of sexual partners reported in surveys show a pronounced skew, with most people having had one or no partners in the past year and a small fraction having had many. Liljeros and colleagues infer from the results of a …
Recent work has focused attention on statistical inference for the population distribution of the number of sexual partners based on survey data. The characteristics of these distributions are of interest as components of mathematical models for the …
Recent research into the properties of human sexual–contact networks has suggested that the degree distribution of the contact graph exhibits power–law scaling. One notable property of this power–law scaling is that the epidemic threshold for the …