Digifesto

I am trying to make statistically valid inferences about the mechanisms underlying observational networked data and it is really hard.

Here’s what I’m up against:

• Even though my data set is a complete ecologically valid data set representing a lot of real human communication over time, it (tautologically) leaves out everything that it leaves out. I can’t even count all the latent variables.
• The best methods for detecting causal mechanism, the potential outcomes framework for Rubin model, depends on the assumption that different members of the sample don’t interfere. But I’m working with networked data. Everything interferes with everything else, at least indirectly. That’s why it’s a network.
• Did I mention that I’m working with communications data? What’s interesting about human communication is that it’s not really generated at random at all. It’s very deliberately created by people acting more or less intelligently all the time. If the phenomenon I’m studying is not more complex than the models I’m using to study it, then there is something seriously wrong with the people I’m studying.

I think I can deal with the first point here by gracefully ignoring it. It may be true that any apparent causal effect in my data is spurious and due to a common latent cause upstream. It may be true that the variance in the data is largely due to exogenous factors. Fine. That’s noise. I’m looking for a reliable endogenous signal. If there isn’t something there that would suggest that my entire data set is epiphenomal. But I know it’s not. So there’s got to be something there.

For the second point, there are apparently sophisticated methods for extending the potential outcomes framework to handling peer effects. These are gnarly and though I figure I could work with them, I don’t think they are going to be what I need because I’m not really looking for a causal relationship like a statistical relationship between treatment and outcome. I’m not after in the first instance what might be called type causation. I’m rather trying to demonstrate cases of token causation where causation is literally the transfer of information from object to another. And then I’m trying to show regularity in this underlying kind of causation in a layer of abstraction over it.

The best angle I can come up with on this so far is to use emergent properties of the network like degree assortativity to sort through potential mathematically defined graph generation algorithms. These algorithms can act as alternative hypotheses, and the observed emergent properties can theoretically be used to compute the likelihood of the observed data given the generation methods. Then all I need is a prior over graph generation methods! It’s perfectly Bayesian! I wonder if it is at all feasible to execute on. I will try.

It’s not 100% clear how you can take an algorithmically defined process and turn that into a hypothesis about causal mechanisms. Theoretically, as long as a causal network has computable conditional dependencies it can be represented by and algorithm. I believe that any algorithm (in the Church/Turing sense) can be represented as a causal network. Can this be done elegantly, so that the corresponding causal network represents something like what we’d expect from the scientific theory on the matter? This is unclear because, again, Pearl’s causal networks are great at representing type causation but not as expressive of token causation among a large population of uniquely positioned, generatively produced stuff. Pearl is not good at modeling life, I think.

The strategic activity of the actors is a modeling challenge but I think this is actually where there is substantive potential in this kind of research. If effective strategic actors are working in a way that is observably different from naive actors in some way that’s measurable in aggregate behavior, that’s a solid empirical result! I have some hypotheses around this that I think are worth checking. For example, probably the success of an open source community depends in part on whether members of the community act in ways that successfully bring new members in. Strategies that cultivate new members are going to look different from strategies that exclude newcomers or try to maintain a superior status. Based on some preliminary results, it looks like this difference between successful open source projects and most other social networks is observable in the data.