Abstract: Negative controls can be used to adjust for unobserved confounders in an observational study. A negative control is a variable that is known a priori to be (1) unaffected by treatment, and (2) affected by the unobserved confounders. Any...
Abstract: Severe degree heterogeneity is a universal phenomenon in large social networks. However, the degree parameters are largely nuisance to our major interest, and their effects can be carefully removed with proper statistical strategies. In the...
Abstract: Estimating the direct effect of a treatment fixing the value of a consequence of that treatment is becoming a common part of social science research. In many cases, however, these effects are difficult to estimate standard methods since they can...
Abstract: In many social science experiments, subjects often interact with each other and as a result one unit's treatment influences the outcome of another unit. Over the last decade, a significant progress has been made towards causal inference in the...
Abstract: Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach to...
Abstract: Many empirical studies throughout the social and biomedical sciences focus only on very narrow outcomes such as income, or a single specific disease state, or a measure of positive affect. Human well-being or flourishing, however, consists in a...
Abstract: Technological advancements in the field of mobile devices and wearable sensors make it possible to deliver treatments anytime and anywhere to users like you and me. Increasingly the delivery of these treatments is triggered by detections...
Abstract: Although social scientists have long been interested in the process through which ideas and behavior diffuse, the identification of causal diffusion effects, also known as peer effects, remains challenging. Many scholars consider the commonly...
Abstract: Big data generated from the internet have great potential in tracking and predicting massive social activities, in particular infectious diseases, whose accurate real-time prediction could help public health officials make timely decisions to...
