This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Rachel Domagalski. Rachel is a Ph.D. student in the MSU Department of Mathematics. 

Networks are widely recognized as important for studying phenomena in multiple disciplines such as communication (how information is diffused), public health (disease spread), and political science (passing legislation). Signed networks are those that contain both positive and negative relationships between individuals. While collecting network data has its own challenges, in some contexts asking about negative relationships is not allowed or impractical. Rachel explores and refines the use of bipartite projections to infer otherwise unobserved or unobservable signed networks. There are several methods that exist for making these inferences, but it remains unknown how valid each one is and under what circumstances they should be used.

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