Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
Volume 103, Issue 481, Pages 248-258Publisher
AMER STATISTICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1198/016214507000000446
Keywords
degeneracy; exponential random graph model; Markov chain Monte Carlo; maximum likelihood estimation; p-star model
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present a systematic examination of a real network data set using maximum likelihood estimation for exponential random graph models as well as new procedures to evaluate how well the models fit the observed networks. These procedures compare structural statistics of the observed network with the corresponding statistics on networks simulated from the fitted model. We apply this approach to the study of friendship relations among high school students from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth). We focus primarily on one particular network of 205 nodes, although we also demonstrate that this method may be applied to the largest network in the AddHealth study, with 2,209 nodes. We argue that several well-studied models in the networks literature do not fit these data well and demonstrate that the fit improves dramatically when the models include the recently developed geometrically weighted edgewise shared partner, geometrically weighted dyadic shared partner, and geometrically weighted degree network statistics. We conclude that these models capture aspects of the social structure of adolescent friendship relations not represented by previous models.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available