MoN12: Twelfth Mathematics of Networks meeting

Steve Gilmour (Southampton) – Optimal design of experiments on social networks

Joint work with Ben Parker and John Schormans

We investigate how connections between subjects in a social network affect the design of experiments on those subjects. Specifically, where we have unstructured treatments, whose effect propagates according to a linear network effects model, we show that optimal designs are no longer necessarily balanced; we further demonstrate how experiments which do not take a network effect into account can lead to much higher variance than necessary and/or a large bias.