Seminar: "Statistical Network Analysis with Bergm"

AUEB STATISTICS SEMINAR SERIES OCTOBER 2021

Lampros Bouranis, Research Fellow, Department of Statistics, AUEB

Statistical Network Analysis with Bergm

ABSTRACT:

Recent advances in computational methods for intractable models have made network data increasingly amenable to statistical analysis. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) emerged as one of the main families of models capable of capturing the complex dependence structure of network data in a wide range of applied contexts. The Bergm package for R has become a popular package to carry out Bayesian parameter inference, missing data imputation, model selection and goodness-of-fit diagnostics for ERGMs. Over the last few years, the package has been considerably improved in terms of efficiency by adopting some of the state-of-the-art Bayesian computational methods for doubly-intractable distributions. Recently, version 5 of the package has been made available on CRAN having undergone a substantial makeover, which has made it more accessible and easier to use for practitioners. New functions include data augmentation procedures based on the approximate exchange algorithm for dealing with missing data, adjusted pseudo-likelihood and pseudo-posterior procedures, which allow for fast approximate inference of the ERGM parameter posterior and model evidence for networks on several thousands nodes. This is joint work with Alberto Caimo (Technological University Dublin), Robert Krause (Free University of Berlin) and Nial Friel (University College Dublin).
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02444
CRAN: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=Bergm

Pdf of the presentation can be found here and a video here.