SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS
MODULE 1: Networks and Society & Network Measures
1.1 Networks and Society
A network is a collection of interconnected entities called nodes connected through edges.
Networks represent relationships among people, organizations, computers, or other
entities.
Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, road networks, computer networks, citation networks.
Components: Node (Vertex), Edge (Link), Graph.
1.2 What is Social Network Analysis (SNA)?
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the study of relationships among people, organizations, or
entities using graph theory. It helps identify influential users, analyze information flow,
detect communities, and predict new links.
Simple graph:
A---B
| |
C---D
1.3 Why Do We Study Social Networks?
To understand interactions, identify influential users, analyze information diffusion, detect
communities, improve recommendation systems, support business decisions, and detect
fraud.
1.4 Applications of Social Network Analysis
Applications include social media analytics, healthcare, cybersecurity, marketing,
recommendation systems, education, transportation, and scientific collaboration.
1.5 Preliminaries
Graph G=(V,E), where V is the set of nodes and E is the set of edges.
Basic terms: Node, Edge, Degree, Path, Distance, Connected Component, Cycle.
1.6 Three Levels of Social Network Analysis
Node Level: Studies individual nodes.
Group Level: Studies communities and clusters.
Network Level: Studies the entire network.
2.1 Network Basics
Types of networks: Directed, Undirected, Weighted, and Unweighted.
2.2 Node Centrality
Measures node importance.
Types: Degree, Betweenness, Closeness, Eigenvector Centrality.
2.3 Assortativity
Measures whether similar nodes tend to connect with each other.
2.4 Transitivity and Reciprocity
Transitivity: Friends of friends tend to become friends.
Reciprocity: Mutual relationships in directed networks.
2.5 Similarity
Measures how similar two nodes are. Common Neighbor and Jaccard Similarity are widely
used for friend recommendation and link prediction.
2.6 Degeneracy
Degeneracy identifies dense core structures in a network using k-core decomposition.
Module Summary
This module covers Social Network Analysis, network representation, applications,
preliminaries, three levels of SNA, network basics, node centrality, assortativity, transitivity,
reciprocity, similarity, and degeneracy.
