PhD course in Agent-based modelling, rescheduled for January 4-6, 2012
This course is organised by the Department of Political Science, CICEP and MILEN. Arild Underdal, Steffen Kallbekken and Nils B. Weidmann will be lecturing over the course of five days, and students will learn how agent-based modelling can be used as a tool of research within the social science framework.
This is a course intended for PhD students who have a use for, or interest in, agent based modelling as a tool in their research. The course exercises will be based on the simple NetLogo programming language, and no prior experience in programming is required. Computational agent-based models (ABM) have become increasingly popular in Political Science. The purpose of an ABM is to simulate the emergence of macro-level social phenomena based on the interaction of individuals. This course provides a comprehensive introduction to ABM, drawing on examples across political science, sociology and economics. Using the free NetLogo software, students learn how to design agent-based simulation models from scratch and evaluate their output. The course starts with a discussion of ABM principles, and proceeds with a step-by-step introduction of essential ABM building blocks and their corresponding implementation in NetLogo. Further topics include the integration of empirical data, and the automatic execution of multiple simulation (“batch”) runs. In supervised lab sessions, students develop their own implementation of an ABM.
For more information about these PhD course please visit the MILEN course website