Event Date
SPEAKER: Aaron Schein / Post-Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University
TITLE: "Measurement and Experimentation in Complex Sociopolitical Processes"
ASBTRACT: Complex social and political processes at many scales—from interpersonal networks of friends to international networks of countries—are a central theme of computational social science. Modern methods of data science that can contend with the complexity of data from such processes have the potential to break ground on long-standing questions of critical relevance to public policy. In this talk, I will present two lines of work on 1) estimating the causal effects of friend-to-friend mobilization in US elections, and 2) inferring complex latent structure in dyadic event data of country-to-country interactions. In the first part, I will discuss recent work using large-scale digital field experiments on the mobile app Outvote to estimate the causal effects of friend-to-friend texting on voter turnout in the 2018 and 2020 US elections. This work is among the first to rigorously assess the effectiveness of friend-to-friend “get out the vote” tactics, which political campaigns have increasingly embraced in recent elections. I will discuss the statistical challenges inherent to randomizing interactions between friends with a "light touch” design and will describe the methodology we developed to identify and precisely estimate causal effects despite these impediments. In the second part of this talk, I will discuss work on inferring complex latent structure in dyadic event data sets of international relations that contain millions of micro-records of the form “country i took action a to country j at time t”. The models we developed for this purpose blend elements of tensor decomposition and dynamical systems and are tailored to the challenging properties of high-dimensional discrete data. They reliably surface interpretable complex structure in dyadic event data while yielding tractable schemes for efficient posterior inference. At the end of the talk, I will briefly sketch a vision for the future of both lines of work.
This talk will be presented remotely via Zoom.