The use of agent-based modeling in projecting risk factors into the future
Bobashev, G., Morris, R., Zule, W., Borschev, A., & Hoffer, L. (2009). The use of agent-based modeling in projecting risk factors into the future. In H. Liu, JJ. Salerno, & MJ. Young (Eds.), Social Computing and Behavioral Modeling (pp. 50-54). Springer Science+Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0056-2_8
Human behavior is dynamic, which means that it changes and adapts. Health sciences, however, often consider static risk factors measured once in a cross-sectional survey. Population or group outcomes are then linked to these static risk factors. In this paper, we show how the use of agent-based models allow one to consider risks in a dynamic sense, i.e., to estimate how risk factors affect future outcomes through behavior. We illustrate the issue of dynamic risks using the examples of the heroin market and HIV transmission on sexual and drug-using networks....
