Social Network Analysis on Food Web and Dispute Data

Several social science disciplines, especially anthropology and sociology, have long engaged in social network analyses. Social Network Analysis (SNA) uses network theory to analyse social networks – a network that often involves individual social actors (people) and relations between them. Social network analysis aims at understanding the network structure by description, visualization, and statistical modeling. In this research, the illustration of the use of SNA is done on two different datasets: food web data and militarized interstate dispute data

Latent Socio-Economic Health and Causal Modelling

This research attempts to develop model-based socio-economic health measures using statistical causal inference and modelling. There is a growing consensus for an alternative measure to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for a country’s socio-economic health. Many conventional ways of constructing the health indices involve combining different observable metrics to form an index. However, the ‘health’ of a society is inherently latent, with the metrics being observable indicators of health. Much effort has been attempted to provide this alternative measure but none to our knowledge so far that uses a model-based approach to reflect the latent health. To take this into account, we adopt the latent health factor index (LHFI) approach that has been used in assessing ecological health. This framework integratively models the relationship between metrics, the unobservable latent health, and the covariates that drive the notion of health. Moreover, we are extending the LHFI approach by integrating it with statistical causal modelling to investigate the causes and effects embedded in the factors influencing health and the metrics. We implement our model using data pertaining to different aspects of societal health and potential explanatory variables. The approach is structured in a Bayesian hierarchical framework and the results obtained by applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. The resulting health measures aim to provide a holistic quantification of the overall ‘health’ of a society.IBISWorld Industrial Gran