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Record W4409581758 · doi:10.1287/mnsc.2022.02953

The Limits to Learning a Diffusion Model

2025· article· en· W4409581758 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueManagement Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicInnovation Diffusion and Forecasting
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDiffusionComputer scienceEconometricsMathematical economicsEconomicsStatistical physicsPhysicsThermodynamics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper provides the first sample complexity lower bounds for the estimation of simple diffusion models, including the Bass model (used in modeling consumer adoption) and the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model (used in modeling epidemics). We show that one cannot hope to learn such models until quite late in the diffusion. Specifically, we show that the time required to collect a number of observations that exceeds our sample complexity lower bounds is large. For the Bass model, our results imply that when new adopters are predominantly driven by imitation, one cannot hope to predict the eventual number of adopting customers until one is at least two-thirds of the way to the time at which the rate of new adopters is at its peak. In a similar vein, our results imply that in the case of an SIR model, one cannot hope to predict the eventual number of infections until one is approximately two-thirds of the way to the time at which the infection rate has peaked. This lower bound in estimation further translates into a lower bound in regret for decision making in epidemic interventions. Our results formalize the challenge of accurate forecasting and highlight the importance of incorporating additional data sources. To this end, we analyze the benefit of a seroprevalence study in an epidemic, where we characterize the size of the study needed to improve SIR model estimation. Extensive empirical analyses on product adoption and epidemic data support our theoretical findings. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, data science. Funding: This work was supported by the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation [Grant 1727239]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02953 .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.758
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.007
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.093
GPT teacher head0.388
Teacher spread0.295 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it