A0669
Title: Design of network-based studies to estimate individual and spillover effects and identify key influencer
Authors: Zhibing He - Yale University (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: Many interventions in public health act in settings where individuals are connected to one another, and the intervention assigned to randomly selected individuals may spill over to their network members. The effects of such interventions can be quantified in several ways. The overall effect measures the average intervention effect across the study population over those directly treated, along with those to whom the intervention spills over but who are not directly treated. The individual effect measures the intervention effect among those directly treated, while the spillover effect measures the effect among those in the network of those directly treated. Here, methods for study design with the aim of estimating individual, spillover and overall effects are developed. In addition, new study designs to find the most influential participants are developed by identifying the heterogeneity of the spillover effect. In particular, an ego network-based randomized design is developed in which a set of index participants is sampled from the population and randomly assigned to treatment while data are also collected for their untreated network members.
