Intervention to Prevention : A Policy Tool for Alcohol Studies

ISBN-13: 9783836478625 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 244 str.

Yasmin Said

Opis

The cover image ranges from dark to light just as intervention in alcohol addiction raises the soul from despair and despondency to hope and health. This book focuses on tools for building a model that allows the investigator to understand the relationships among the negative acute outcomes related to alcohol consumption. This model, in turn, can be used to develop a policy tool to study interventions that minimize the probability simultaneously of acute outcomes occurring. The model is mathematically and statistically based; in particular, it is an agent-based, time-dependent stochastic hierarchical directed graph model that also includes the social network phenomena. The mathematical underpinnings of this model involve probability theory, graph theory, and social network analysis. This book presents a methodology and a tool for investigating the impact of interventions on the multinomial distribution of acute outcomes associated with alcohol misuse. The model is calibrated by estimating conditional probabilities based on actual experience. Interventions are then modeled by adjusting conditional probabilities in the directed graph.

O autorze

Yasmin Said is a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Fellow
of the NIH and was a Visiting Fellow at the Isaac Newton
Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of
Cambridge. She earned her PhD in computational statistics. She
does alcohol modeling, agent-based simulation, social network
analysis, text, image, and data mining.