Authors
Balint Neray
Publication date
2018/4/10
Journal
Computational Research Day
Publisher
Northwestern University Libraries
Description
The sexual network topology of individuals and their communities may affect the spread of infectious disease both within and across specific populations. To better understand this process, we collected ego-centric data on the personal sexual networks of 175 young men who have sex with men. Respondents were asked to nominate sexual contacts and the sexual contacts of their nominees (n=602). Among the 741 men in the sample, 360 were Black, 164 Latino, 156 White, and 61 other race/ethnicity. Researchers often use ego-centric network data to investigate hard-to-reach populations, especially individuals living with or at risk for HIV. Ego-centric data, however, are typically incomplete, which makes studying disease spread difficult. For this reason, a semi-supervised entity-resolution scheme was designed in order to match data for unique individuals. Entity resolution yielded a reconstructed network with 628 …