Speaker: Edoardo Airoldi,
Assistant Professor of Statistics, Harvard University
Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm.
Title: Design and Analysis of Experiments that Leverage Social Structure and Interactions
Abstract: A number of scientific endeavors of current national and international interest involve populations with interacting and/or interfering units. In these problems, a collection of partial
measurements about patterns of interaction and interference (e.g., social structure and familial relations) is available, in addition to more traditional measurements about unit-level outcomes and covariates. Formal statistical models for the analysis of this
type of data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of study. In this talk, I will review a few ideas and open areas of research that are central to this burgeoning literature, placing emphasis on inference and other core statistical issues.
Then I will turn to describing a technical notion of non-ignorability that applies to sampling designs that leverage social structure, an inference strategy that can be used to obtain valid estimates in these settings, and a randomization-based approach to
estimating the causal effect of peer influence, with hints to applications to advertising on social media platforms, politics and healthcare in which these statistical problems arise.
Bio: Edoardo Airoldi received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 2006. His dissertation introduced statistical and computational elements of graph theory that support data analysis of complex systems
and their evolution. Airoldi's research interests encompass statistical methodology and theory with application to molecular biology and integrative genomics, computational social science, and statistical analysis of large biological and information networks.
Specific areas of technical interest include probabilistic algorithms, approximation theorems, convex and combinatorial optimization, and geometry.