Event Phone: 1-610-715-0115

Cancellation Policy: If you cancel your registration at least two weeks before the course is scheduled to begin, you are entitled to a full refund (minus a processing fee of $50).

In the unlikely event that Statistical Horizons LLC must cancel a seminar, we will do our best to inform you as soon as possible of the cancellation. You would then have the option of receiving a full refund of the seminar fee or a credit towards another seminar. In no event shall Statistical Horizons LLC be liable for any incidental or consequential damages that you may incur because of the cancellation.

A 3-Day Remote Seminar Taught by Paul Smaldino, Ph.D.

Understanding the behavior of complex social systems is tricky. Mathematical and computational models are used by a wide range of social and biological scientists to clarify hypotheses and test the consequences of their assumptions. Agent-based models are a class of formal models in which individual actors are instantiated as computational objects. This enables us to account for variability in agent properties (including biological and behavioral traits, physical and network locations), and allows us to explore, through simulation, how macro-level phenomena emerge from micro-level behaviors under constraints. They have been used to better understand social phenomena such as cooperation, collective problem solving, polarization, segregation, traffic flow, the spread of disease, and the emergence of social norms.

In this three-day seminar, you will learn the basics for understanding, building, and analyzing agent-based models using NetLogo, a popular, free, and easy-to-learn language designed expressly for coding and visualizing agent-based models.  We will focus on models of contagion, which are important in epidemiology and public health but are also widely used to understand how behaviors, ideas, and innovations spread. By the end of the course, you will be able to build, visualize, and analyze your own agent-based model of contagion, and will have the resources to engage with and build models of other phenomena.

This course is for those wishing to get their feet wet working with agent-based models of social systems. It is designed to be accessible to students who are relatively new to agent-based modeling, while still being useful to more experienced modelers. The course uses NetLogo, which is a software tool and programming language designed to be easy to learn but powerful enough to be used for real research. However, many of the techniques we will learn are platform-independent, and so will apply whether your future modeling work uses NetLogo or some other programming language or software library.  The course focuses on models of contagion, which is of particular interest these days for some reason. However, most of the modeling techniques you will learn are applicable to models of social dynamics more generally.

You can learn about modeling by watching and listening, but you can only learn how to model by practicing. This course therefore emphasizes hands-on practice with coding and analyzing agent-based models.