link-tracing

Methods for Inference from Respondent-Driven Sampling Data

Respondent-driven sampling is a commonly used method for sampling from hard-to-reach human populations connected by an underlying social network of relations. Beginning with a convenience sample, participants pass coupons to invite their contacts to …

Evaluating Variance Estimators for Respondent‐Driven Sampling

Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is a network-based method for sampling hard-to-reach populations that is widely used by public health agencies and researchers worldwide. Estimation of population characteristics from RDS data is challenging due to …

Removing Phase Transitions from Gibbs Measures

Gibbs measures are a fundamental class of distributions for the analysis of high dimensional data. Phase transitions, which are also known as degeneracy in the network science literature, are an emergent property of these models that well describe …

Network Model-Assisted Inference from Respondent-Driven Sampling Data

Respondent-driven sampling is a widely used method for sampling hard-to-reach human populations by link tracing over their social networks. Inference from such data requires specialized techniques because the sampling process is both partially beyond …

On the Concept of Snowball Sampling

A phenomenon in the sociology of science is that multidisciplinary fields tend to produce a plethora of inconsistent terminology. Often the meaning of a term evolves over time, or different terms are used for the same concept. More confusing is the …