MASTER OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS

BA 3003 – Computational Social Science

9 – Analyzing Agent Based Models

Ruvan Weerasinghe
<arw@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk>

UNIVERSITY OF COLOMBO SCHOOL OF COMPUTING

What to do with ABMs
• We looked at example ABMs
• We then tried extending models we already had
• We then proceeded to build an ABM from scratch
• The wolf-sheep simple model
• Next we discussed the main components of an ABM
• Agents, environment, interactions, observer and schedule
• So, what is the purpose of building an ABM?
• To study it and gain new insights on emergent properties!

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Analyzing Agent Based Models
• Case study: disease spread
• Best known model – the SIR model
• Susceptible – those in population who are not yet infected!
• Infected – those who are currently infected
• Removed – those who recovered or died
• An important parameter is r0
• The number that the disease infects before the person
infecting recovers
• e.g. if r0 is 5, in 3 steps 156 are infected (how?)

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Case study: disease spread
• This assumes unlimited population to be infected
• Usually the case at the onset of a disease
• At some point this number will tail off owing to not
having enough hosts to infect
• Not unlike what happens in pyramid schemes which
require unlimited numbers of gullible individuals!
• Other possible complications
• No uniform mixing among infected, different
susceptibilities to disease, environmental interactions (?)

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Case study: disease spread (contd.)
• Check the spread of
disease example in
the IABM library
• Run as is to see
typical ‘S’ curve of
most ‘adoption’
models

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Case study: disease spread (contd.)
• Note the 3 variants implemented
• Mobile agents – the base model where agents move
randomly
• Networked agents – a model that incorporates the fact that
individuals interact with others in their ‘circles’ (controlled
by the connections per node parameter)
• Environmental model – a model that incorporates the
agency of the environment it spreading the disease
(controlled by the disease decay parameter)

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Case study: disease spread (contd.)
• Will the model run the same each time?
• i.e. the number of ticks for all to
be infected be the same?
• Try it! Set the speed to fast to
save time!
• How can we investigate how population density
affects disease spread?
• We do multiple runs and check time to 100% infection

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Case study: disease spread (contd.)
• It’s a feature – not a bug!
• These processes are deliberately stochastic
• So, running a simulation multiple times is a requirement
• Different ways to do this in NetLogo What does this do?

• Implement within the code repeat 10 [

• Run it from the command
center ‘observer’ prompt
• Use the BehaviorSpace ]
set num-people 50
setup
while [ count turtles with
[ not infected? ] > 0 ] [ go ]
print ticks

module under the Tools menu

• The preferred way!

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Case study: disease spread (contd.)
• BehaviourSpace experiments
• Need to name the experiment
• All variables that can be varied
automatically show up
• Allows the setting up of the
number of repetitions
• Need to specify what to report
• Name the procedures to run
• Can specify timeout if needed

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Case study: disease spread (contd.)
• 4 experiments are already setup
• Population density – changing the number of people
• Degree – changing the number of connections per person
(in the network model)
• Environmental – changing the length of time the disease
can stay on surfaces or the air (environmental model)
• Density and decay – changing two variables together
(which model?)

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Case study: Population density experiment
• Population density experiment – output (csv file)

Try it yourself

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Case study: Population density experiment
• Summary (descriptive) statistics
• Do in excel itself?
• Use R
• Use Python/Matplotlib
• Visualizing the data
• A pic is worth 1000
words!
• All the data
• Summary data

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Case study: Population density experiment
• Can also visualize time series data
• Not just the end of run
• ABMs keep transitionary data – again all and summary data

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Case study: Environmental experiment
• Changing the environment
• Spread from environment too
• Varying the disease decay
variable
• As before output to csv file

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Case study: Network experiment
• Changing the interactions
• Spread from friends and
colleagues – not random
• 100% infection not guaranteed
• Use # infected at timeout

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Case study: Multivariate experiment
• So far we varied ONE variable at a time
• What if we want to vary more than one?
• We need to:
1. Establish base settings and vary from that
2. Aggregate over all other variables
3. 3D Charts of combinations
4. Use regression to fit a model

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Case study: Multivariate experiment (contd.)
• Changing density & decay
• Change each for all the values
of the other
• Why 440 runs?

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Case study: Multivariate experiment (contd.)
• Changing density & decay – modeling with
regression
• If the model is really complex we can regress our output
variable on all of our inputs
• This gives us a sense of how critical each input is to driving
the output – and check for interactions

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Homework
• Do the descriptive statistics
• And the visualizations (all data and error bars)
• 3D visualization for multivariate case
• Regression model

• Using a tool of your choice

• Excel itself, R or Python/Java…

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