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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Design Of Randomized Experiments In Networks, Dylan Walker, Lev Muchnik Nov 2014

Design Of Randomized Experiments In Networks, Dylan Walker, Lev Muchnik

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Over the last decade, the emergence of pervasive online and digitally enabled environments has created a rich source of detailed data on human behavior. Yet, the promise of big data has recently come under fire for its inability to separate correlation from causation-to derive actionable insights and yield effective policies. Fortunately, the same online platforms on which we interact on a day-to-day basis permit experimentation at large scales, ushering in a new movement toward big experiments. Randomized controlled trials are the heart of the scientific method and when designed correctly provide clean causal inferences that are robust and reproducible. However, …


Building A Computer Program To Support Children, Parents, And Distraction During Healthcare Procedures, Kirsten Hanrahan, Ann Marie Mccarthy, Charmaine Kleiber, Kaan Ataman, W. Nick Street, M. Bridget Zimmerman, Annel L. Ersig Oct 2012

Building A Computer Program To Support Children, Parents, And Distraction During Healthcare Procedures, Kirsten Hanrahan, Ann Marie Mccarthy, Charmaine Kleiber, Kaan Ataman, W. Nick Street, M. Bridget Zimmerman, Annel L. Ersig

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This secondary data analysis used data mining methods to develop predictive models of child risk for distress during a healthcare procedure. Data used came from a study that predicted factors associated with children's responses to an intravenous catheter insertion while parents provided distraction coaching. From the 255 items used in the primary study, 44 predictive items were identified through automatic feature selection and used to build support vector machine regression models. Models were validated using multiple cross-validation tests and by comparing variables identified as explanatory in the traditional versus support vector machine regression. Rule-based approaches were applied to the model …


Identifying Social Influence In Networks Using Randomized Experiments, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker Oct 2011

Identifying Social Influence In Networks Using Randomized Experiments, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker

Business Faculty Articles and Research

The recent availability of massive amounts of networked data generated by email, instant messaging, mobile phone communications, micro blogs, and online social networks is enabling studies of population-level human interaction on scales orders of magnitude greater than what was previously possible.1'2 One important goal of applying statistical inference techniques to large networked datasets is to understand how behavioral contagions spread in human social networks. More precisely, understanding how people influence or are influenced by their peers can help us understand the ebb and flow of market trends, product adoption and diffusion, the spread of health behaviors such as smoking and …


Optimizing Product Line Designs: Efficient Methods And Comparisons, Alexandre Belloni, Robert Freund, Matthew Selove, Duncan Simester Jul 2008

Optimizing Product Line Designs: Efficient Methods And Comparisons, Alexandre Belloni, Robert Freund, Matthew Selove, Duncan Simester

Business Faculty Articles and Research

We take advantage of recent advances in optimization methods and computer hardware to identify globally optimal solutions of product line design problems that are too large for complete enumeration. We then use this guarantee of global optimality to benchmark the performance of more practical heuristic methods. We use two sources of data: (1) a conjoint study previously conducted for a real product line design problem, and (2) simulated problems of various sizes. For both data sources, several of the heuristic methods consistently find optimal or near-optimal solutions, including simulated annealing, divide-and-conquer, product-swapping, and genetic algorithms.