An Empirical Analysis of the Kanye West Conjecture

Drawing inspiration from a Gelman blog post and a paper by Rouder et al (2016), I wanted to create a function that plots the possible statistical models a researcher may use given a set of covariates and the dependencies between models.

Explore one of many possible ways missingness can emerge in a network.

Imagine we have three people in a (very small) college seminar class: Taylor, Ash, and Morgan. At the beginning of the semester, none of these three people know each other, but at the end we observe that Taylor and Ash have become friends, Taylor and Morgan have become friends, but Ash and Morgan are not friends. How many different ways could friendship have formed between these 3 people? In this post I provide an answer to this question by drawing on insights from set theory, graph theory, and combinatorics.