STA 290 Seminar: Nathaniel Stevens

STA 290 Seminar Series

DATE:             Thursday April 5th, 4:10pm

LOCATION:    MSB 1147, Colloquium Room

SPEAKER:      Nathaniel T. Stevens, Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco (website)

TITLE:             “Detecting Change in Dynamic Networks”

ABSTRACT:   Dynamic networks are often used to model the communications, interactions, or relational structure, of a group of individuals through time. In many applications, it is of interest to identify instances or periods of unusual levels of interaction among these individuals. The real-time monitoring of networks for anomalous changes is known as network surveillance.

This talk will provide an overview of the network surveillance problem and propose a network monitoring strategy that applies statistical process monitoring techniques to the estimated parameters of a degree corrected stochastic block model to identify significant structural change. For illustration, the proposed methodology will be applied to a dynamic U.S. Senate co-voting network as well as the Enron email exchange network. Several ongoing and open research problems will also be discussed.