Inferential Approaches for Network Analyses: AMEN for Latent Factor Models

Understand

We introduce a Bayesian approach to conduct inferential analyses on dyadic data while accounting for interdependencies between observations through a set of additive and multiplicative effects (AME).

• The AME model is built on a generalized linear modeling framework and is thus flexible enough to be applied to a variety of contexts.
• We contrast the AME model to two prominent approaches in the literature: the latent space model (LSM) and the exponential random graph model (ERGM).
• Relative to these approaches, we show that the AME approach is a) to be easy to implement; b) interpretable in a general linear model framework; c) computationally straightforward; d) not prone to degeneracy; e) captures 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order network dependencies; and f) notably outperforms ERGMs and LSMs on a variety of metrics and in an out-of-sample context.