Angelo Mele (Department of Economics, Carey Business School)

Lingxin Hao (Department of Sociology, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences)

Gerard Lemson (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences)

Social networks are fundamental in social sciences. The study of social networks, however, has been limited to small networks for three reasons. First, network data scale quadratically with the number of individuals. Second, structural strategic models of network formation and dynamics and agent-based models of social interactions impose complex challenges in estimation. Third, how homophily (the tendency for individuals to connect based on similar characteristics) arises from common unobserved attributes is a new area of research that demands huge computational capacity. In this project we will integrate structural modeling from economics and agent-based models from computational sociology with data-intensive methods developed in the physical sciences to study the dynamics of social networks. We will apply our methods to school friendship networks and migration networks at SciServer and make our simulated data and computational codes available for the research community.