Becoming an Agent-Based Modeller

Theory and Practice of Building Agent-Based Models in the Social Sciences
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-61558-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 260 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Becoming an Agent-based Modeller takes you on a journey, from curiosity about social phenomena to generating them with a computer simulation. The book introduces agent-based modelling as a method to understand societies as complex systems, systems of interconnected, interdependent and interacting agents.

The book is structured like a course rather than a textbook or reference book. The core  of the book is an extended tutorial introducing the NetLogo programming language. Using the example of an epidemic, it explores how an agent-based model of social influence, situational awareness, and contextual decisions by individual agents about protective behaviour can help us understand plausible epidemic trajectories. The tutorial demonstrates how to build an agent-based model from scratch and use it in research, including the conceptualisation stage, the operationalisation and implementation, experimentation and interpretation. This practical part of the book is embedded in chapters on theory, epistemology and ethics of agent-based modelling.

With pedagogical tools including key discussion points, illustrations, and highlighted concepts, this is an ideal resource for courses on ABM, and for postgraduate students, and researchers in the social sciences and beyond, who wish to develop their understanding of agent-based modelling.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Elsenbroich, Corinna

Badham, Jennifer

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik Mathematik Stochastik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Forschungsmethoden

Inhaltsverzeichnis

I: Conceptualising Agent-based Models  1. Modelling the Social World  2. Building an Agent-based Model  3. Ethics of Agent-Based Modelling;  II: Building Agent-based Models  4. Preliminaries  5. Model 1: Model Entities  6. Model 2: Introducing Time and Space  7. Model 3: Agents Making Decisions  8. Model 4: Representing Relationships  9. Models 5-8: Enhancements  10. Bringing it all Together;  III: Working with Agent-based Models  11. Turtles on the Move  12. Tricks of the Trade  13. Experiments  14. Is your Model Fit for Purpose?  15. Being an Agent-Based Modeller

Über Autor(innen)

Jennifer Badham is Assistant Professor in Social Data Science in the Department of Sociology at Durham University, UK. She is a computational social scientist, interested particularly in how social structure shapes the transmission of ideas, disease or behaviour.

Corinna Elsenbroich is a Reader in Computational Modelling at the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is a complexity social scientist with a background in philosophy of science, sociology and complexity social science methods.